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INVISIBLE EXERCISE 



INVISIBLE EXERCISE 

Seven Studies in Self Command 
With Practical Suggestions and Drills 



BY 

GERALD STANLEY LEE 

Author of "Crowds" '* 

Being the story of one man's experience in coming through 
to a new kind of exercise — a setting-up exercise taken 
without getting up ten minutes early — an exercise that 
can be taken in half a minute without interrupting one's 
work, while sitting at one's desk, while standing and 
talking in the street, or lying hack in an easy chair — 
taken without anybody's knowing one is taking it, and 
eventually without even knowing it one's self. .... 




NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

68 1 FiPTH Avenue 



Copyright, 1922, 
By E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 



A.U rights reserved 



,n\ 



^""U 



V 



Printed in the United States e4 America 



M -3 1922 

A674440 



TO JENNETTE AND A WORLD 

**jind I saw the free souls of poets. 
The loftiest bards of all ages strode before me, 
Strange large men, long unwaked, undisclosed, were 

disclosed to me 
• , . , my rapt verse, my call, mock me not! 
. . . . / will not be outfaced by irrational things^ .... 
/ will confront these shows of the day and night 
I will know if I am to be less than they, 
I will see if I am not as majestic as they, 
I will see if I am not as subtle and real as they, 
I will see if I have no meaning while the houses and 

ships have meaning. . . . '* 



CONTENTS 



STARTER 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. On Being Noticed by One's Doctor i 

. II. On Being Noticed by One's Self 3 

ni. On Not Grabbing Health by the Tail & 

IV, Three Little N.B.'s. ^ 14 

PART ONE 

EXERCISES FOR LAZY AND BUSY MEN 

I 

Adventures in Not Walking 

, . .1. Exercise for Lazy and Busy Men 23 

. II. Exercising a Lot in a Little 27 

. III. The Exercise of Keeping Still 35 

. rV. A Hundred People Open My Eyes 39 

V. How to Like Walking as Well as Dancing 43 

VI. Walking an Hour in Ten Minutes ,,,,,,,,, 51 

II 

Adventures in Sitting Down 

I. Learning to Sit Down: My First Sit 61 

. II. Learning to Sit Down: My Second Sit 64 

. III. I Struggle with the Easy Chair 67 

. TV. Rehearsals on a Stool 70 

V. Rehearsals in a Morris Chair 73 

VI. Parlors and Backs 76 

.VII. Learning to Lounge ,,,,,,,,,,,., 78 

vii 



viii Contents 



m 

Lying Down Efficiently 

CBJOnZ PAGE 

I. Learning to Lie Down 83 

II. Learning to Lie Down: The Wiggle Test 85 

III. Learning to Lie Down: The Hang Test 94 

IV. People Who Thump 97 

Vt People with Light Heads and Light Feet, ,,,,,,,, 102 

IV 

Sleeping Fast 

L The Truth About Sleep 111 

n. A Religion for Going to Bed 113 

ni. Just What Happens When One Sleeps Fast 117 

rV. The Art of Steering One's Sleep: 

The Art of Liking to Get Up 120 

V, Just What Happens When One Sleeps Slow: 

Directions for Not Letting It Happen 123 

VI. The Sleepless Bogey 128 

Vn. The Feeling Tired Fake ,,....... 132 



PART TWO 

ADVERTISING ONES SELF TO ONE'S SELF 

I 

Getting the Attention of a Body 

I. The Body as a Machine: 

Where to Take Hold First to Get Its Attention. . 141 

II. In and Up 148 

III. Up and In 1S3 

IV. How to Take a Longer Back 157 

V. Being as Tall as One Likes 161 

VI. Summary ,,, ,..,,,,, 164 



Contents ix 



n 

Four Drills 

CHAPTER PAGS 

I. Introducing the Drills 171 

n. The Lie-Down Drill 175 

ni. The Sit-Down Drill 184 

^ IV. Sitting Orders 190 

V. Standing Orders 195 

VI. Introducing the Walking Orders 199 

VII. Walking Orders 202 

VIII. Sliding Scale of Orders 208 

I2Wf l^uta Viui f t f 1 1 1 « • 1 1 > 1 1 1 f 1 1 f f f t f f t f f 1 1 f f f r r f f 31^ 



III 

Getting the Attention of a Mind 

I. A Working Conception of Self Control: 

The Self Control of Animals 217 

n. Our Dogs and Us 221 

III, What Any Man Can Learn from a Dog. ,,,,,,,,, 227 



IV 

Going Forward to Nature 

I. Folks and Machines 235 

n. People Who Make Nature Hum: 

Exercise Addicts 239 

m. Letting Nature be Natural 244 

IV. A Bridge, Some Stairs and a Moral 251 

The Bridge 251 

The Stairs 252 

The Moral 255 



Contents 



V 
Looking Up the Open Road 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. The Consent to Live 261 

II. The Use of Fads and Taboos 266 

III, Making Health Catching. ,,.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 269 

Closing Introduction 

Why There Is One 275 

i. Putting the First Thing First 275 

ii. Still Putting the First Thmg First 277 

iii. This Book and Education 280 

iv. This Book and the Practical Teacher 281 

V, This Book and the Reader ,,,.,,.,,,»,,,, 285 

Appendix 

Invisible Exercise and Christian Science 293 

Others 297 



INVISIBLE EXERCISE 



INVISIBLE EXERCISE 



STARTER 
§ i. On Being Noticed hy One's Doctor 

\\T HEN I step in to a dentist with a 
* " toothache, and he has that noble 
cheerful professional interest in my tooth and 
in saving my interesting tooth, I feel like 
saying to him, "But how about mef^ He 
regards me — all the rest of the six feet of 
me — as a semi-detached encumbrance or in- 
convenience which somehow that tooth, that 
absorbingly interesting tooth that has got to 
be saved, must put up with. What happens 
to me in the six weeks — to all the rest of me 
— seems to him a meddlesome idea to bring 
up. I am a subhead under an incisor. 

The way a man feels with his dentist (that 
is with the average run of dentist — not with 
mine) is the way he feels with nearly all the 
men who make a profession of looking after 
the things in him that don't work. 

They are a fine type of men, no doubt, but 
most of the health experts we go to, to set 



2 Invisible Exercise 

us up, the men who prescribe programs to 
us, and regimens for keeping fit, are alike 
in one thing. It does not seem to have oc- 
curred to them to notice us — to notice that 
we are plain busy people. 

Most of our health experts in America do 
not seem to take American men as they ac- 
tually are and as they actually have to live, 
seriously. What they seem to be interested 
in, is in telling us what we should do if we 
were somebody else. 

What American men ought to do today — 
most of us living under conditions of compe- 
tition largely beyond our control — is to get 
together, face out all these self-centered 
specialists — health-sticklers who are trying to 
put health over on us in a way that is con- 
venient for them, or for millionaires, or for 
angels, but not for us — and tell them in a 
body what we think. 

We are weary of standing before physi- 
cians and, in some painful broken-down mo- 
ment of our lives, having them tell us placidly 
and as if they were in some other world, just 
what the things are, we must do to be well, 
when all the time they know, and everybody 
knows, that there is no possible way in which 
anyone who lives in this one, can do them. 

We want physicians to notice us, stop put- 



Starter 3 

ting up regimens and programs for us — for 
ordinary busy human men — of things to do 
that only an angel or an acrobat would try 
to do, and that only a millionaire or a Me- 
thuselah would have time for. 

If we American men today, instead of 
having health-experts in a hundred thousand 
towns and cities trying to put health over on 
us, in our most helpless and foolish moments, 
would get together, and instead of taking 
what they hand out to us, would put in our 
order to them, for some kind of health-idea, 
or health-technique that fitted into the lives 
we have to live, what would this order be 
like? 

§ ii. On Being Noticed by One's Self 

Here is my declaration of independence, 
or bill of rights, as to what I want and do 
not want, in the way of a program for 
health-command. 

First. — I do not want to be an Angel — 
give up everything I like, right and left, to 
live — be a noble, wonderful and beautiful 
character to digest a dinner. 

Too many waste motions — it seems to me 
— ^just for a dinner. 

Second: — I do not want to be an Acrobat. 



4 Invisible Exercise 

Of course, if a man really likes it, if he 
really enjoys standing on his head, walking 
on his elbows, squirming his stomach and 
hanging from a trapeze, taking all the pains 
a monkey has to, to be well, there is no ob- 
jection, but I don't like it. These things do 
a monkey good because he is entertained by 
them. The monkey's way is not a very 
bright way for me — I cannot help thinking. 
As in being an angel, there are too many 
waste motions. 

Third. — I do not want to be a Chemist, 
study my proteids, indulge in fat worries and 
acid cares while I eat. I do not understand 
people who, with nice hearty human foods 
steaming up to them from their plates, sit 
and brood and moon chemically before they 
eat. People who, when they are dining with 
me, put in all their time thinking of their 
stomachs instead of thinking of me, seem to 
me rude. I have no use for people who talk 
about belonging to a Society for Controlling 
The Appetites, as if it were belonging to 
a church, people who are Pharisees with a 
Welsh rabbit — all these delicate sterilized 
souls brought up on predigested baby foods, 
who save their saliva, who weigh their pep- 
sin, who are always coddling their faint 
vague weak alimentaries before everybody. 



Starter 5 

I do not say I blame people — ^people who 
seem to like these deep dreamy visceral 
broodings — I suppose they are doing the best 
they can according to their liver and lights, 
but it must be bad for them. And why 
should not the study of diet be attended to, 
decently and privately and once for all and 
got out of the way? 

I believe in chemistry. I believe in saliva 
and in gastric juice and in pancreatic fluids 
and all the other chemicals one has to have, 
as much as anyone, but it does not go with 
my nature, somehow, at a dinner table to 
stop doting on the sweetbreads on my plate 
and sit and dote on mine. 

I am not for my sweetbreads. My sweet- 
breads are for me. If a man is perpetually 
taking care of his interior utilities they can- 
not be worth it. 

Fourth, — I want health to burn. I do not 
want anything to do with a doctor more than 
once, who tells me that I must look out for 
my health. I propose to have health that 
looks after me. A man who, with the actual 
connivance of a serious doctor, arranges with 
himself to keep niggling at being well, who 
keeps making nice little moral dabs at his 
health, insults nature and slanders God. 
He is mooning about what health is. I pro- 



6 Invisible Exercise. 

pose to have health to burn or die. The 
sense every minute, every day, of having 
health to burn, is what health is. 

Fifth. — I do not want to be evicted from 
my life — put out on the sightseeing dump of 
the world — in order to be well. If I can help 
it, I am going to keep out of the hands of a 
doctor who will make me believe that I must 
break away from everything I care for, — the 
ambitions and enthusiasms for which I live 
— make a great Baedeker-gap in my life, and 
take a long staring vacation or die. I want 
a setting-up exercise or program which will 
rescue me from deliberately vacating my life, 
and going around outside of everything look- 
ing into other people's windows, watching 
other people live. I glory in my work, and if 
the way I do it, is not good for me I propose 
to know why. 

Sixth. — I do not want to be evicted from 
myself to be well — ^put off with a health pro- 
gram that proceeds upon the assumption that 
the only possible thing to do with a man who 
has a natural gift or enthusiasm that is doing 
its best to run away with him, is to emascu- 
late him. All persons, relatives, doctors, 
friends, enemies or advisers who will delib- 
erately take, or seek to take, the legitimate 
natural enthusiasm or central power in a 



Starter 7 

man's life — the creative (desire he finds it 
difficult to master, and that it is desirable he 
should find it difficult to master — put this 
enthusiasm on the one side of him as his 
secret enemy and then put some safe, drab, 
tame, meek health, 'way over on the other 
side of him, as his only friend and savior and 
tell him solemnly he must choose between 
these two, must turn against one to have the 
other — I say that people who do this are 
superficial and dangerous people to be al- 
lowed a hand in a real man's life. They are 
off on their facts — as to the actual psychol- 
ogy of health control. 

They turn the whole process of health- 
control precisely around. 

When a man has a great natural force — 
a driving power in him that urges him on, 
the natural gift for seeing a thing so deeply 
and for caring about it so much he will die 
for it — this natural force in him, instead of 
being regarded as his handicap, should be 
grabbed by his physician with a hurrah as the 
supreme incalculable asset the man has, with 
which a physician can compel him to be well. 

If a physician instead of looking at a man 
as a bag of meat and bones, would study him 
as a whole human being, and would then take 
hold of the center-hold in the man, he could 



8 Invisible Exercise 

handle everything else In him. The moment 
a man really believes and plainly sees his 
physician conceiving his health-program for 
him, and presenting it to him as a part of his 
day's work, as the best way to get into a day 
three times as much work, he will meet his 
physician more than half way. He will be- 
gin to fairly plot, to daily conspire with his 
physician, to help him have health. 

The kind of doctor live men are looking 
for today is the doctor who bones down to 
his job, the doctor who can really make a 
sale of some health to a patient, who studies 
each patient as a whole — studies out a spe- 
cific technique for him in the way other ef- 
ficiency engineers do, for living his own par- 
ticular kind of life. 

§ Hi. On Not Grabbing Health by the Tail 

If a man does not propose to be an angel, 
an acrobat or a chemist to be well — has 
signed up once for all on his bill of rights as 
a human being, and has set out to have health 
to burn, without being turned out of his job, 
and without being evicted from his own life 
— what is there he can do to find a technique, 
a daily program for keeping fit which he can 
put through himself? 



Starter 9 

My own feeling is that this technique for 
health a man should look for, if it is going 
to be one he will really put through, should 
have four outstanding points. 

It should be simple — one single thing to 
'do. 

It should be sure. It should be of such a 
nature that he will fully understand it and 
believe in it, will know that it works and'why 
it works. 

It should be short, so that it can be con- 
veniently fitted into his daily life and will 
really be used. 

It should be self-running. It should be a 
technique which when a man has once mast- 
ered himself with it, becomes a habit, makes 
him master of himself daily, automatically 
and without his thinking of it. 

The most important of these four points 
is that one's technique for health control — 
for getting the attention of one's body, 
should be simple. 

As I figure it, there are In this country 
just now — allowed perfectly wild and loose 
in it — just twenty-nine sets of people out 
hankering after every man's health. 

The first thing a man wonders about and 
wants to know, facing these twenty-nine 
people, is how to be simple. 



lo Invisible Exercise 

Here is the list of the twenty-nine sets of 
people one has to extract simplicity from. 



The Eddyites * 

The Psycho-theraps (Mental hygiene) 

The Psycho-Utterers (New thought) 

The Psycho - Putterers (Psycho - ana- 
lysts) 

The Zone Psychists 

The Hypos (The hypnotists) 

The Auto-Hypos (self-hypnotists) 

The Sanita Hummers 

The Annie-Payson-Callers (or Power- 
ful Reposers) 

The Ortheopedites 

The Osteopathites 

The Dieteaters 

The Vegetableites 

The Vibratites or Buzzers 

The Squoogers and Squirmers 

The Headstanders and Upside-downers 

The Chiropracticklers 

Toothites 

Hittites (boxers) 

Pillites 

Cutters and Excavators 

Germers and Sterilizers 

Ductless-Glanders 

Chewers 

Breathers 



Starter 1 1 

Fire (bakers and broilers) 

Water 

Mud 

Muldoon * 

These twenty-nine sets of people while 
they are a bit confusing are very much alike, 
in one regard. They are all alike in making 
one feel that health is an anxious and compli- 
cated problem to be met by the full brunt of 
one's religion — by calling upon God, or by 
calling upon somebody who will be anxious 
for one. 

There are four courses of action the ordi- 
nary exposed American can take with regard 
to the twenty-nine ideas these people say he 
must keep thinking of. 

( 1 ) He can say Pooh ! to the whole 
twenty-nine, and put them off on God. 

(2) He can go to their twenty-nine 
places one after the other and try out on the 
premises each idea — as long as he lasts. 

(3) He can stay at home and every day 

*The people in this list, from The Christian Scientists 
to Muldoon are named not without regard — in some cases 
the very highest regard for their contribution to our time, 
as the reader will see later in this book and in the ap- 
pendix. 

I am merely giving the list here in this way just to 
run the gamut of the bewilderment of the world, and 
show what any simplicity a man may get, has to be ex- 
tracted from. 



12 Invisible Exercise 

as he goes to bed or gets up in the morning 
or sits down to a meal he can think of the 
twenty-nine things he has got to remember 
— the twenty-nine things they all say he has 
got to keep thinking of, every minute, every 
hour, every day, — as long as he lasts. 

(4) He can insist on being simple. He 
can say he will not keep nagging himself 
every day thinking of the twenty-nine things, 
that he will see the twenty-nine things as they 
are in their relation to one another, jam the 
whole twenty-nine into one and think of that. 

More people would have time to be well 
and would stop postponing it, if someone 
would just mention to this country, what this 
one thing to be thought of was. 

I have found myself asking myself two or 
three questions about it and making prelimi- 
nary answers as well as I could. 

From what direction should I look for such 
an idea to come? 

Not from the twenty-nine specialists and 
experts, but from some common or garden 
kind of man who is tired of being cut up 
and separated, and tired of having one 
twenty-ninth of him cured at a time. 

What would I know the idea by when It 
came? 

I decided that whatever else might be true 



Starter 13 

of this central idea, a hundred million people 
want, there was one thing of which I could 
be sure. There would be something inevit- 
able about it, universal and elemental. I 
would not make the mistake of looking for 
it as if it would have to be some great thun- 
dering discovery that would take people's 
breath away. I would know it probably at 
first by its seeming almost foolishly simple. 

It would be an idea which, when once 
acted on and carried out would involve no 
worry, no philosophy, no religion, no scien- 
tific study, no profound expert, to help a 
normal man to take advantage of it. 

Probably too, this centralizing idea would 
turn out to be something old and made up 
of almost disgracefully familiar facts — facts 
people think they see, but never see enough 
to see together. 

What I propose to do in these pages is to 
take a few of these facts — facts I have ex- 
perienced and that we all have experienced, 
look at them hard enough and long enough, 
to steady them, focus them and act on them 
together. 



14 Invisible Exercise 

Three Little N. B.'s 
I 

This is not going to be an anxious book on 
health. 

An anxious book on health is a disease of 
itself. There is not going to be a single 
pathological minute in this book. 

I should hate — just because I am writing 
about being well — to be abandoned by a 
hundred million husky readers of books in 
this country and feel myself being side- 
tracked, put off in what I have to say, on a 
vast lonely Physiological Siding with invalids 
and tired people. 

If I had dared I would have swept across 
the whole front of this book in big bouncing 
letters the title 

FOR WELL MEN ONLY 

I would rather add twenty per cent to the 
efficiency of well men than sixty per cent to 
the efficiency of sick ones. Sick men do sick 
things, or tired things, and the more one 
adds to their efficiency — the more one is ex- 
posing the country to them, and exposing the 
world. One does not want to wish sick men 
were dead, but when one thinks of the world 



Starter 15 

today and of what sick men — (In Russia for 
instance) the more efficient ones, are doing 
to it, and of what tired or hysterical men 
are doing to it — the last thing one wants to 
be a party to, is saying anything or whisper- 
ing anything in this world just now that will 
make the sick more efficient in it. 

The things I have to say are human, not 
pathological, and are addressed — addressed 
above all others — to men who feel fine, who 
are never conscious of anything more than 
some passing vague discomfort, and who 
would be amused at the idea of there being 
any particular need of their reading a book 
on learning to lie down or on learning to sit 
up. 



II 



It would be too bad to feel people follow- 
ing up what I have to say about self-control, 
because of any false pretension or over pre- 
tension. So I like to say before anyone goes 
on any further, that the people in this world 
who, instead of getting a good honest straight 
self-control themselves — a self-control that 
has some nerve in it because they have got 
it themselves — expect to have some nice 
ready-made self-control handed over to them, 



1 6 Invisible Exercise 

presented to them outright in a book, will 
miss something in this one. 

I wish also to disclaim writing in these 
pages for people who want to be told what 
to do about their health — ^people who expect 
to be given rules and orders and to be told 
to mind, who want to be tucked up in bed 
by Mother, shut their eyes, have a pill put 
in their mouths and trust Providence and the 
Pill — ^particularly the Pill. 

A pill does for a man what it is supposed 
to do anyway — whatever he does — does it 
when he is asleep. 

There is no pill — spiritual or otherwise in 
this book. 

And there is no authority in it — no big 
bow-wow. It is just one man getting up and 
telling a straight plain story of what has hap- 
pened to him. 

What the nice white space at the end of 
each chapter says is. Take It Or Leave It. 



Ill 



If there were any way it could be managed 
I would have this book equipped with a pow- 
erful little steel spring in the back and the 
book would shut up tight all by itself, no 



Starter 17 

matter what the reader thought or said, every 
fifteen minutes. 

It would remain locked for five minutes 
for the reader to think. 

A reader really ought to be allowed that 
long, while reading, — it seems to me — to 
think. Incidentally among other things he 
thinks of in his Rve minutes, locked out of 
the book, he can think whether he really 
wants to go on in it as much as he thinks he 
(does. Then if he likes he can go on. 

This provision for letting a reader spend 
fifteen minutes in having things happen to 
him and five minutes in assimilating them — 
In making some sense out of them for his own 
life, is no more than Is really fair to an 
author. 

Of course, a cook in placing food before 
people, cannot help having a natural half- 
guilty hope that he is cooking it so well, or 
bringing the flavor out so much, that they 
will want to eat more at a time than they 
ought. 

But after all, when all Is said and done, 
what is really good in this book is what Is 
going to happen or can be made to happen 
when the reader is taking his turn, or during 
the reader^s five minutes. The situation be- 



,i8 Invisible Exercise 

tween us — between author and reader as it 
seems to me, sums up something like this: 

(i) Food should not be blamed for being 
eaten too fast or too much. Why should 
pie on a plate be held responsible for 
not sinking away gracefully from before 
a man, just in time — back through his 
plate? 

(2) An author in a book obviously cannot 
shut himself up just in time as he can in 
talking. 

(3) A steel spring with an alarm-clock at- 
tachment shutting me back into this book 
is impracticable. 

The only possible substitute I can think of 
is to say squarely before we go on that it 
seems to me that Vv^hen the reader comes 
along and sees the author — -sees me, for in- 
stance, lying in this way helpless in my own 
book — as helpless as pie on a plate, and when 
the reader knows that I should be shut up, 
and when the reader knows that I cannot 
shut myself up, won't he please shut me up 
for me? 



PART ONE 
Exercises for Lazy and Busy Men 

I. Adventures in Not Walking. 
II. Adventures in Sitting Down. 

III. Lying Down Efficiently. 

IV. Sleeping Fast. 



I 

ADVENTURES IN NOT WALKING 



EXERCISE FOR LAZY AND BUSY MEN 

A FRIEND I met in the train the other 
-^ ^ day asked me what I was doing just 
now and I said I was writing of some of my 
adventures in sitting down. 

"Tacks ?'^ he said. 

I told him tacks were safe and sane — even 
insipid — as compared with other things 
people did or let themselves in for, in sitting 
down. 

When a man sits down on a tack he is in- 
stantly reminded v/hat he is about and in- 
stantly does something about it. 

When a man — a well man, a man who is 
strong enough not to notice — sits down eight 
hours a day in a chair at his desk in a way 
that begins quietly, steadily lopping years off 
the end of his life, while he may not get ex- 
cited about it — it would do him good if he 
did — he would find his adventures in not do- 
ing it any more, and in sitting as he never 
sat before, quite as interesting and quite as 
much to the point as a tack. 

I am introducing to people in this book 
23 



24 Invisible Exercise 

what some of these adventures are like and 
what they have led me to. 

What I am dealing with in it, is the driv- 
ing power of the busy man — the secret for 
the active man, of frictionless motion and 
of swift and efficient rest. 

The great majority of people one sees 
about one are wasting half their strength 
every day, doing their walking, standing, sit- 
ting, and lying down, in ways which throw, 
and daily keep throwing, their bodies out of 
gear. The more they do, and keep doing 
these four rather dangerous things, the more 
they damage and warp the physical machine, 
the more friction there is in the way the ma- 
chine runs, the more comfort and sense they 
cut out of living, and the more they limit 
their efficiency and shorten their lives. 

The reason the average man is sick is that 
he does these things all day in a position of 
body which makes, and would be obliged to 
make, any sensible person sick. He is run- 
ning his health on too low a gear for his 
health to work. 

For the most part the average civilized 
man today is doing the same thing with his 
body, that he does when he throws away 
eighty-seven per cent of the motor-value of 
coal. He is using thirteen per cent of the 



Exercise for Lazy and Busy Men 25 

motor value of the body and letting eighty- 
seven go. He is doing this mainly by fric- 
tion — by not holding the different parts of 
the body where they were fitted in to be and 
have to be, to do their work. Because of 
the way he holds himself, it tires him to sit. 
Very often it even tires him to sleep. 



This book is the story of one man's ex- 
perience in finding out that this statement is 
a true statement of what is happening to 
many people today. 

It is not written by a man who is setting 
himself up as an expert in self-control, but by 
a man who is finding out — among other 
people who are finding out — a way to live. 
I am telling this story of what I have found 
out, to compare it with others. The story is 
the simple story of a man who thought he 
learned to walk when he was a baby, a man 
who thought he knew how to sit up, who has 
practiced on sitting at a desk thirty years, 
and who at least thought he knew how to lie 
down, who has found out at fifty that he 
didn't ever really learn how to do any of 
these things, and is learning how now. 

As he has been going about practicing on 
himself and watching other people he has 



/ 



26 Invisible JSxercise. 

come to one or two unexpected conclusions 
about civilized people as they are living 
today. 

Knowing how to walk, apparently, is very 
rare. Very few people can even stand still. 
Sitting and lying down are so lazy that no- 
body ever tries, ever uses any brains at all to 
do them and thinks any old way will do. 
Hundreds of millions of people in the world 
today — people who spend twenty-five years 
of their lives lying in bed and probably 
twenty years more of their lives sitting in 
chairs — have never once really thought out 
how to do them. 

As one never misses a minute in all one^s 
life in doing one or the other of these four 
things it does seem as if they were worth 
doing rather well, and I have been studying 
myself, and studying other people for some 
little time as well as I could, and have picked 
out and put into daily use for myself what 
seems to me to be the fundamental principle 
of the four natural positions the human ma- 
chine has to run in — the principle of sitting, 
standing and walking with quickness and 
ease, and of lying down and sleeping fast. 



n 

EXERCISING A LOT IN A LITTLE 

I have spent as I count up the hours, some 
twenty-three years of my life sitting down. 
Sitting goes with my profession. 

Walking and lying down are, with me, only 
a means to an end. Any walking or lying 
down I do, is for the purpose of sitting down 
better. 

Many millions of other people in this coun- 
try are like me In this. So far as the most 
important part of their lives is concerned, 
they live as human right-angles. The main 
thing they do in the world is a thing they 
have to do while sitting and their success in 
what they are doing, turns on their knowing 
how to sit while doing it. 

My first idea in learning how to sit down, 
came from testing out in the course of my 
daily exercise, a better way to walk. 

As my adventures In sitting down all turn 
on this — on the fundamental principle I came 
on while walking — I naturally begin my story 
of sitting down at the beginning, and I am 
asking my readers to do a little walking with 
27 



28 Invisible Exercise 

me — a very little, if they don't mind — before 
we sit. 



I have had for a good many years the 
habit, during my morning's work, of break- 
ing away at some convenient point in an idea, 
and taking my idea out to air. 

With twenty square miles of meadow, 
without a house or a fence in sight and two 
mountains and the sky, I take a walk, and 
have a couple of mountains criticise me. 
Then when I come in and sit down again with 
my idea, something good — something better 
than I could do — usually has happened to it. 

For a long time when I did this, I took 
what would be called a contemplative walk. 

The walk grew more and more contem- 
plative. Gradually it came over me that I 
would get more, probably, out of being more 
brisk. 

I thought I would try out this idea of being 
more brisk for what it was worth, and for 
a long time every morning I made myself 
violently stop thinking, shot myself out of 
my study, and walked across the slow and 
peaceful meadow as if I were catching a train 
just around the next corn sheaf. 



Exercising a Lot in a Little 29 

I did this a whole season. 

The next season, after just getting back 
from a kind of tirade of health at Muldoon's 
— ^where I was supposed in a final orgy of 
self-discipline to run a mile uphill to the 
house at the end of a five-mile hike — I came 
home with the idea that the thing I really 
ought to do, probably, was to keep on, in my 
humble way, muldooning myself. 

"What you need" I said to myself (with 
a rather lively but fool-remnant of a New 
England conscience), "what you need after a 
Spell of Thought, is shaking up and deep 
breathing." 

Very soon I had it all worked out neatly 
that for a man who earns his living in a 
chair, quality and not quantity was what was 
wanted in exercise. I ought to be more in- 
tensive. Why should I, because I had al- 
ways been a tramp — had for years taken off 
three solid hours from every day and spread 
them out faithfully into a long wide dutiful 
hike — keep it up forever? 

If a man can get as much exercise out of 
ten minutes' fast running as he can out of two 
hours of mild thoughtful meander, why 
meander? 

After giving myself this treat of good ad- 



30 Invisible. Exercise. 

vice I stopped walking for some weeks and 
began running. I liked running to begin 
with. I had always liked running — especially 
running down steep hills and mountains with- 
out breaking my neck. I was a little apt to 
be absent-minded in exercise and not break- 
ing one's neck was at least interesting. And 
besides I had used for years as a boy one 
of the first of the bicycles with the little 
wheel behind — the old-fashioned high bicycle 
for taking regular headers — and I missed 
them. 

Anyway — this was the spirit of my idea 
and I made out my program accordingly at 
once. I agreed with myself that I would 
take a short sharp peremptory time off, for 
a run of twenty minutes every morning, every 
afternoon, and every evening. I would get 
winded three times a day. My blood was too 
much in my head. So I began the next day, 
and almost any morning that season — all 
that season — any bleak winter morning I 
might have been seen, a small speck out in 
the great snowy meadow, hurling my blood 
down from my head to my feet and running 
for dear life. 

The great meadow is a lonely place. Now 
and then a train away over on the edge 
would go by. No man I would ever see, saw 



Exercising a Lot in a Little 31 

what I was doing. And I was glad Muldoon 
didn't! 

I kept it up rigidly. I breathlessly be- 
lieved my theory. If I had acquired a bad 
absent-minded habit of walking, the more 
completely I stopped my old habit, the 
quicker I could grip a new one. 

So I never walked at all. I took my runs 
in town or country wherever I happened to 
be. Now and then, of course, if I was in a 
small town where people look at one another 
and notice one another as fellow human 
beings, I would slow up for looks, but in the 
country I could run as fast as I liked and in 
New York if a man is seen running, he is 
catching a train or a car, and he is only 
Number 4,378,967 anyway. The only way 
anyone can attract attention in New York is 
by looking intelligent, by looking interested, 
and not hurrying. 

While as I look back on it now, this whole 
proceeding was unnecessary; it was probably, 
with my strenuous temperament and secret 
love of doing something a little too hard, the 
best thing I could do at the time, and it cer- 
tainly gave me, at whatever unnecessary cost, 
better, more immediate and more reliable 
results in the way of keeping fit than I had 
ever had before. 



32 Invisible Exercise 

There was at least a kind of heartiness in 
it, and after all, a large part of sound psy- 
chology in exercise lies in doing something 
one likes to do. And I could not but prefer 
running to walking, because I was more inter- 
ested in my mind than my legs, and being an 
absent-minded person, I was compelled in 
running my legs very fast, to put my mind 
into them. 

Slowly it occurred to me that the fact that 
I was practically obliged to go on the dead 
run to get my mind down into my legs was 
really not a very complimentary fact about 
my mind. 

I began wondering if I could not get the 
necessary attention to my exercise in some 
less violent way. 

This idea kept coming back to me as I ran, 
and still coming back, and naturally the faster 
I had to run to put my mind into it, the 
cheaper I felt about my mind. 

Gradually I substituted for running rap- 
idly, running slowly. Then still more slowly. 
I got interested in seeing how far I could 
run without being winded. I made studies 
while running, in effortlessness. Instead of 
putting my mind into running rapidly I put 
my mind into running perfectly and with the 
line of least resistance. 



Exercising a Lot in a Little '2i 

Slowly I was getting my mind over into 
what I was doing with my body. 

Soon, to get my mind into what I was 
(doing, I did not need to run at all. 

I began walking in the same way. 

Soon, to get my mind into what I was do- 
ing, I didn't even need to walk. 

I began standing quite still and poising and 
balancing my body. 

I had begun to guess the truth. I had 
begun to discover perfection or quality of 
exercise as a substitute for quantity of exer- 
cise. 

Finally, the day came when I came into 
my own — a day I can never forget. On a 
high sunny morning I ran down out of my 
study to the meadow and stood quite still and 
found as I stood quite still, I was as good as 
on a dead run! Motionless, invisibly bal- 
anced, high-charged with the voltage of my 
own poise, of my own stillness. ... I stood 
still. . . . 

Then having my high-voltage to work with 
I came back to my study and sat down to my 
new chapter. I had saved my electricity for 
my new book — for the readers of my new 
book — instead of running wildly, spilling it 
off the ends of my feet for two miles, and 
warming and electrifying a meadow. 



34 Invisible Exercise. 

I had got down at last to what appears to 
me now to be the nib — the nib of the whole 
idea of taking exercise. 

Exercise is coordination — the coordination 
of mind and body. 

What coordinates the mind and the body 
the most, the most quickly and the most 
easily, gives the most exercise. 

It is not the amount of exercise a man 
takes. It is the amount of coordination or 
balance of parts he gets out of the exercise 
he does take, which determines its value. 
The more coordination per ounce of strength, 
the more exercise one has taken. 

This brought me to an entirely new con- 
clusion as to the method the modern man — 
with the kind of busy, sedentary preoccupied 
desk-life he has to live, would probably find 
most adapted to his purpose in keeping fit. 



m 

THE EXERCISE OF KEEPING STILL 

I have always had the habit of not letting 
my walks be interfered with by cold or by 
stormy weather, and being on the whole an 
extra hard person to heat and having natur- 
ally very little asbestos on, and not holding 
the heat I have, I have fallen into the habit, 
on very cold days, of walking fast to whip 
up my circulation. 

One day when I was walking against the 
west wind — so cold I had to turn around 
every few minutes to warm my face — I came 
to a turn in the path (it was up on Mount 
Tom) heard a Boston and Maine whistle, 
and stopped to see the train, as I often do, 
small and creepy down below me, coming up 
the valley. 

At first from where I stood, I could only 
hear it. Then from over the top-rock on the 
next summit, I could only see the steam and 
the smoke. Then I wished I was taller and 
for one minute, or possibly two minutes, I 
stood on tiptoe, craned my neck to look and 
suddenly grew warm I 

3S 



3^ Invisible Exercise 

Absolutely still after running, and right 
out in the middle of a bitter wind, I grew 
warm. 

I did not get much of a view of the train 
in that two minutes but I got a view of my- 
self, saw through my own heart, saw how 
my heart worked and how it kept my hands 
and feet warm, in a way I had never dreamed 
before. 

Hundreds of times since that day when I 
could not get warm in a bitter wind by run- 
ning, I have brought my run up sharp to a 
full stop, and of course, without the moun- 
tain and the train and all the other fittings, 
I have gone through the whole performance 
all over again, stood on tiptoe a minute and 
craned my neck to warm my hands and my 
feet. Then I would finish off by going up 
and down very slowly on my toes. 

My first idea was that the toes had a good 
deal to do with it and that they were the 
important part of the performance, but when 
a week or so later instead of taking my walk 
on Mount Tom, I found myself walking in 
New York and trying to keep warm on Fifth 
Avenue, naturally not wanting to draw a 
crowd on the Avenue by the way I warmed 
myself, I stepped up to a show window, 
looked at what I liked in it, stretched my 



Exercise Keeping Still 37 

upper back slowly, let myself be as tall as 
I could and before I knew it and before I 
had got the things in the window half done, 
my toes and fingers had got as warm on the 
Avenue as they did on the mountain. 

The toes and rising on the toes did not 
seem to have much to do with it. The thing 
that got the result apparently was something 
in the back — in the stretching, heightening 
and widening of the back. 

Of course, I was acting not as an expert 
or a scientist — just as a man trying to find 
something out. I did not go very far. But 
there was some intimate and important con- 
nection — a connection one could do a great 
deal with apparently, if one made the most 
of It — between the upper back and the ex- 
tremities of the body. The upper back and 
the feet and the hands, judging from their 
intimacy — from the way they took each other 
personally — were under a single control and 
were meant to be managed together. 

Probably, if one could use the principle of 
stretching the upper back to get warm and 
could increase at will the control of one's 
circulation in the body, one could use it to 
increase one's control of everything else . 

All one had to do was to follow it up 
consciously and make the most of it, increase 



38 Invisible Exercise, 

by daily training one's conscious control of 
the back, and one had a command for in- 
stant or for constant use of what was prac- 
tically a way of turning on and of keeping 
turned on, a new gear of power, of self-com- 
mand and health in the body. 



IV 

A HUNDRED PEOPLE OPEN MY EYES 

While I was still thinking about it — about 
how I warmed my feet on Mount Tom and 
on Fifth Avenue — and still trying to work 
through to some fundamental principle I 
could use every day all the year round, I 
found myself one hot July night, motoring up 
through the White Mountains on my way to 
Maine. After driving in a dense blackness 
all alone I came quite late in the evening to 
a big hotel, and vAth the deep subconscious 
beat and rhythm of my engine still going in 
my ears and the darkness still in my eyes, I 
found myself all in a minute in the glare of 
a big yellow ball room, standing on the edge 
and watching a hundred people dance. 

I was sizing up the hotel, I suppose, in 
my mind a little — the way one does — and I 
liked the people very well until they sat down. 
Then in some way they all seemed different. 
One had to look into their faces to see if 
they were the same people; they seemed so 
disappointing and as if they had slipped back 
into some other world when they sat down. 

39 



140 Invisible Exercise 

After all the grace and lightness I had come 
into, they seemed rather common after all 
and heavy and soggy and strange. 

Then after the music started up again I 
went to bed and early in the morning in the 
big white, silent hotel, in a great sunshiny 
dining room without a footfall, I ate my 
breakfast, and drove away. 

Being all alone with nothing but the 
rhythm of my engine, and with nothing in 
particular in the way of a mountain in sight 
for twenty miles, I fell to thinking about the 
people and how they had all changed over 
into somebody else — spoiled the hotel in a 
minute — the night before. I wondered why 
it was and how they did it. 

I began thinking what it was about dancing 
that gave it its touch of glamour and other- 
worldliness and that made the people so dif- 
ferent when dancing, — not only to others 
apparently, but different to themselves. 

Most people seem to like themselves bet- 
ter while dancing. Why do most people like 
dancing so much better than walking? Why 
is it that thousands of people who are too 
tired to take a walk around a block will 
dance thirty miles in a night? 

The nearest I could get in twenty miles to 
answering this question was this: People 



A Hundred People Open My Eyes '41 

have to pull themselves together more to 
dance than they do to walk and when they 
find that being pulled together more, is far 
more comfortable and pleasurable, — they 
naturally like it, and naturally like anything 
that makes them do it. 

The reason that most people one sees 
walking up and down the street are not in the 
act before all our eyes of enjoying walking 
as much as they enjoy dancing is, that when 
they are walking they are able to walk fairly 
well — able at least to keep from tipping 
over, without being particularly coordinated 
to do it — that is: without (as in dancing) 
particularly and enthusiastically connecting up 
their brains and their feet. 

People are compelled to coordinate their 
minds and their bodies in order to dance at 
all, and naturally, having been driven by main 
force into discovering, while dancing, how 
delightful connecting up one^s head with 
one's feet is, and having acquired the habit 
of being temporarily alive in a ball room, 
they keep going over and over again to ball 
rooms to be temporarily alive. 

It does seem, when one thinks of it, too 
bad, to confine being especially alive in this 
way to ball rooms. 

I doubt if in a week's time there would be 



42 Invisible 'Exercise 

three people left in America who would Ho 
it, who would consent to have their especially 
lively time confined as severely as this, if 
there were any way in which everybody could 
stop to think next week, what it is about ball 
rooms that makes people so enjoy them and 
look forward to them. 

The one thing about dancing that makes 
anyone ever do it, is that it is the most co- 
ordinating commonly-known exercise there is. 



HOW TO LIKE WALKING AS WELL AS DANCING 

Anything one has occasion to do, if one 
does it from one extreme to the other — does 
it all over and from head to foot, does it 
really pulling one's self together to do it, as 
one has to in dancing — will have the same 
effect as dancing. 

If a thousand young women in New York 
who prefer dancing, who think walking is 
heavy and prosaic, and who haven't poetry 
of motion enough left over in a day to enjoy 
taking a walk in it, would begin next v/eek 
practicing faithfully and would then start a 
fad of walking down Fifth Avenue in Ori- 
ental costumes with water jars on their heads, 
the time would not be long at hand when 
they would feel themselves getting as much 
pleasure out of their walking as they do out 
of their dancing now. Incidentally, they 
would get as much pleasure (in their new 
coordinated state of commanding themselves 
from head to foot) out of everything else 
they had occasion to do from day to day in 
which poise, and self-command and quietness 
count. What is more, a thousand young 

43 



44 Invisible Exercise 

women In New York who had ever walke'd, 
or been able to walk down Fifth Avenue with 
water jars on their heads, if they were to 
change their foreign costumes and leave their 
jars at home, would be known by all New 
York as they walked the street, at sight. As 
for dancing with one — with a girl who wore 
a water jar — there is not a man on earth who 
would not know her in the dark. 

If a railroad-rail, a foot from the ground, 
were put down Fifth Avenue from the Park 
to Washington Square, and all the young 
men and women under thirty who get tired 
walking and never get tired dancing, were to 
walk downtown on it from the Park to Wash- 
ington Square, and put their brains into their 
feet forty blocks a day, there wouldn't be 
one of them at the end of a month, who 
would not be getting as much pleasure — as 
much vivid, aesthetic pleasure and glow — out 
of plain walking as out of dancing before. 

The necessity the typical young New York 
girl often seems to be under, of actually being 
obliged to dance, and dance hard to get her 
brain and her feet together, her necessity of 
[employing an orchestra or a phonograph, and 
troops of able-bodied young men, to get her 
mind to go as far as her feet. It Is to be 
devoutly hoped, is only temporary. 



Walking Like Dancing 45 

No one, for the world, would interfere 
with the work the able-bodied young men put 
in on her — on a pleasant young woman in an 
evening, in coordinating her, but one cannot 
help thinking how much more exhilarating it 
would be, dancing with a young woman who 
had learned to walk, who could even walk 
perhaps without having to have rubber heels, 
whose brains reached as far as her feet all 
the time, and who was in the habit of being 
a spirited person whenever she liked. 

[I have just been thinking for a minute 
that perhaps it would do no harm and would 
be more polite to go back over this last para- 
graph and put in "he" instead of "she," 
throughout, but everybody knows how it is 
anyway — knows that a great deal more of 
the heavy work in ball rooms is put in by 
lively and light-footed young women on 
stodgy smiling young men.] 

On both sides, heaven knows, they are will- 
ing enough to put in the work, and it is to 
be hoped they always will be, but playing is 
more fun. And one cannot help wondering 
after all, if people make work even of danc- 
ing together, what it would be like when they 
come to walking together or living together. 



46 Invisible Tlxercise 

One often hears people say rather thought- 
fully and as if of course, they had settled 
something, "Extremes meet.'* 

But do they? If the people of this pres- 
:ent world could make their extremities meet, 
could really make them work together, they 
would be so well they wouldn't know who 
they were in a week. In thirty years, doc- 
tors would be gone by. In thirty years more, 
;even clergymen would be gone by. 

This is what we would have to look for- 
ward to, if people would take a little pains 
to be whole — that is, to use their brains and 
feet as one piece. 

The real point in the remark that extremes 
meet is that they don't. 

They try to meet. What every man really 
wants to know for his own use in his own 
body, is how to make them, or more accu- 
rately, how to let them. 

They are always trying to. 

All one has to do to see how natural and 
fundamental making extremes meet, as a 
principle of self-control, is and how it works, 
is to watch the beginnings of self-control in 
two sets of people — in babies — ^people who 
have just been found, and in adolescents — 
people who are just finding themselves. 



Walking Like. Dancing^ 47 

The first thing after his mother's breast, a 
baby shows any real interest in is toes — and 
in connecting up his brain with his toes. He 
is always waving them around, practicing his 
brains on his toes, coordinating them in all 
sorts of pleasant ways, and when he is being 
most blissfully coordinated of all, and comes 
to his real climax, and puts his brains and his 
toes together the most, he puts his toes in 
his mouth. 

What it is that really keeps a baby occu- 
pied (anyone can see for himself) is putting 
his extremities together. When he cannot 
get the further ends of his legs into his 
mouth, he works the further ends of his arms 
around and puts in his fists. 

It would probably be found, if the real 
serious statistics were collected, that the ar- 
tists and artisans, the great handy men, engi- 
neers and organizers of the world who rose 
to the top were those who — until they found 
something else to do with them — sucked their 
thumbs the hardest. The great motor gen- 
iuses of modern life, the steamboat and rail- 
road men, Robert Fulton and Alexander 
Cassatt, sucked their toes. James J. Hill 
apparently did both. . . . 

The same principle of making extremes 



'48 Invisible Exercise 

meet as a method of self-control can be seen 
in its later stage in young people emerging 
from adolescence, who are not yet quite 
waked up, or it can be seen in all people 
young or old who, for any reason at any par- 
ticular time are in a half-waked up state. 

What seems to be true and of special per- 
isonal interest to most of us is that people 
:enjoy doing things apparently in exact pro- 
portion as doing them wakes them up — that 
is: coordinates them, and the reason young 
people who are too tired to walk a mile, 
dance thirty miles in a night is that the com- 
pulsion they are under in order to dance at 
all, of putting their heads and their feet to- 
gether, makes their whole bodies between, 
and everything their bodies do between, as 
light as a breath. 

There is not the remotest reason why feel- 
ing the body as light as a breath should be a 
mere ball room feeling, or why thousands of 
young women in America and thousands of 
young men should have a sudden feeling of 
heaviness when they have merely to walk. 

The different parts of a man's body feel 
heavy because some of the parts feel — and 
feel with perfect truth — that they are im- 
posed on, and that they are lugging around 
the others. 



Walking Like. Dancing 49 

The only thing that can make a man, while 
he is carrying his body, feel light, is single 
control. 

The only possible way to get single con- 
trol is to string up, or one might almost say 
tune up, the parts of the body to where they 
belong on the spine until they are so light 
and so play together, they hardly know they 
are there. 

Make two extremes act together anH 
everything that comes between them acts to- 
gether. 

If the tip or the top-piece of a man's spine 
— the nub way up at the end which he calls 
his brain, coordinates with his finger tips and 
his toes, everything in the man, soul and 
body, that comes between rests and moves 
as it should. 

This should be the basic principle, as it 
seems to me, of any setting-up exercise or 
exercise for keeping fit a man may work out 
or select. 

At least this is the principle I thought out 
as I slid down to Maine through Crawford 
Notch from seeing, on top of the mountains, 
a hundred people dance. 

It was a principle I have had no occasion 
to stop believing since, but it was not until 
some time after (and after, as they seem 



50 Invisible ^Exercise 

now, some quite unnecessary postponements 
and disappointments) that I found the idea 
could be finally worked out into a setting-up 
exercise in which I was really able to practice 
what I believed. 

Any man who will take any exercise and 
will relax his neck to take it and stretch and 
lengthen his back by reducing the curve in 
the lower part of it, will find that a great 
deal of refreshment can be had out of the 
exercise by taking very little of it. 



VI 

WALKING AN HOUR IN TEN MINUTES 

If a man has some hearty, tiring, ortho- 
dox, puff-and-sweat exercise he takes regu- 
larly every day, with which he is accustomed 
to coordinate his body in three hours, there 
is no reason why — if he likes it — any fault 
should be found with it. 

But if he has some other little almost in- 
visible setting-up exercise three minutes long 
he can do — like poising his body while stand- 
ing for three minutes absolutely still — and if 
he finds he can take his uncoordinated mind 
and body, and by poising his mind and body 
in the right way together for three minutes, 
can really coordinate them, the plain fact is, 
of course, he gets no more real exercise — no 
more essence of exercise — in three hours, 
than he does in three minutes, and naturally, 
it is open to him to save his time or not as 
he likes. 

It is at least open to him — to a plain busy 
man who cannot afford to take time off except 
at intervals, for the gym or the hike — to take 
advantage at least for every-day use, of this 
principle of taking the essence of exercise. 

SI 



52 Invisible Exercise 

I have come into the way of taking what 
some people would call a setting-up exercise 
I suppose — a common basic exercise or drill 
for finding and taking the true and easiest 
position for all five of the great familiar 
practices of life — sitting down, lying down, 
walking and standing and sleep. 

I am not going to attempt at once to de- 
scribe with diagrams or words this rather in- 
nocent and simple little exercise. 

Saying just what it is, just how one does 
it, and just how it looks and how it feels — 
describing it — that is, describing a new phys- 
ical experience with diagrams and words, 
would be a good deal like trying, with a man 
who has never had the taste of a grape, to 
describe to him with diagrams and words or 
with pictures how a grape feels when it bursts 
upon the palate. 

All one can do is to say enough, if possible 
to make him think he would like to try a 
grape. 

There are two questions, however, about 
a physical experience people have not had, 
— about a new setting-up exercise — in re- 
sponse to which something can really be said, 
in words. 

What is it for? i.e., What is its end? 



Walking an Hour in Ten Minutes ^2 

What is the essential motion in it through 
which one secures the end? 

The end of the exercise is to coordinate 
the body from head to foot. 

The motion through which one does this 
is the stretching or letting out of the back. 

One secures this end by stretching the 
back with what one would have been inclined 
to call at first an incredible lack of effort. 
It is essentially an exercise in ease and con- 
sists in each man's studying out for himself 
his own balance for his own back, and follow- 
ing up his own line of least resistance. 

Though, of course, the exercise is one 
which I can take in two minutes without any- 
body knowing I am taking it, at any time in 
any place, and whatever I am doing and in 
any position I happen to be or need to be, it 
is not an exercise in the ordinary sense so 
much as a knack one drills one's self in, of 
balancing the body on the spine, for what- 
ever one has occasion to do — a basic move- 
ment — a common denominator for all ex- 
ercise and for all rest. 

At first the drill one gives one's self — the 
orders one gives to one's body in it — have 
to be given in certain particular positions. 

Later when one has perfected one's self in 



54 Invisible Exercise 

it, it can be taken in a chair or curled up in 
bed or standing on one foot. Whatever the 
thing may be one wants to do, whether walk- 
ing, running, sitting or lying down, if one 
does it by balancing one's self a fleck taller 
while doing it, the result is secured. 

At first one makes the motions for the new 
positions and the new balance consciously. 
Then before one knows it, one begins holding 
the position unconsciously, as an ingrained 
habit. Except for the taking of the two- 
minute drills as a refreshment when one likes, 
one begins carrying and holding one's self in 
the new and easier way while lying, sitting 
and walking without its seeming a new way 
at all, and without thinking of it from one 
end of the day to the other. 

The thing that causes weariness in an easy 
thing like walking or sitting, is that a man is 
letting himself fall into a false balancing of 
the body, — is running out of true, is subordi- 
nating the back to the stomach instead of sub- 
ordinating the stomach to the back. 

It is possible by simple means at will, to 
reverse this balance. 

When this balance is reversed there is im- 
mediate relief. 

When it is habitually reversed there is 
permanent relief. 



Walking an Hour in Ten Minutes 55; 

The man who stops carrying or trying to 
carry his own backbone like a millstone 
around his stomach all his days, and who 
makes his backbone carry him, lives with such 
ease, with such a new sudden strange light- 
ness, he finds It hard to remember who he is. 

Here is the conclusion and the basis of it 
in three sentences: 

The best and most thorough test of any par- 
ticular exercise is generally admitted to be the 
deep breathing it induces. 

Experience has shown that all exercises in 
direct control or forced control of breathing 
are bad, and that the only deep breathing that 
is good, is the deep breathing that is induced. 

A man can make himself breathe more deeply 
with twenty minutes* standing than he can with 
twenty minutes* running. And the deep breath- 
ing will be more normal and will last longer. 

After working through to this truth and 
trying it out for a year, while I do not want 
to speak for others or as an authority, I 
naturally feel qualified to speak of what has 
happened to me. To make a long story 
short, what has happened to me is this: I 
get as much exercise this year out of stand- 
ing, as I did last year out of running. 

I still keep up my habit of taking walks, 
and taking runs — ^because I like them — 



56 Invisible Exercise^ 

in the afternoon and evenings when conven- 
ient. 

But they are for the most part luxuries 
and for the love of being outdoors. The de- 
termining thing I do for my health is less 
strenuous. 

And in the morning when I have the least 
time, use my health the hardest and need it 
the most, instead of going out to take a 
twenty-minutes' walk during work, I go out 
and take a twenty-minutes' stand. 

I take in as much more air, lower my dia- 
phragm, deepen my lungs, quicken my heart- 
action and peristaltic action, relieve my 
nerves and stretch my legs and my back as 
much in taking a twenty-minute stand today, 
as I used to last year in twenty minutes run- 
ning. 

Of course, this is not saying I would get 
less exercise out of running twenty minutes 
than standing twenty minutes today, because 
I have today a new running as well as 
new standing technique. It is saying that 
twenty minutes perfect and highly coordi- 
nated standing and balancing on the toes, 
gives me a much greater result in physical 
well being — and in being fit, than twenty 
minutes of the old and poorly coordinated 
running would give. 



Walking an Hour in Ten Minutes 57 

In using the word **exercise" I mean result 
of exercise — having my machine In Its newer 
gear — running In Its new and unexpected de- 
gree of coordination — running as effortlessly 
and as smoothly as water running down hill. 

Having learned In my pursuit of suitable 
rexerclse for a lazy and busy man, how to get 
the good of running standing still, the next 
thing I naturally wanted, of course, was to 
see if there was not some way of exercising 
sitting down. 



II 

ADVENTURES IN SITTING DOWN 



I 

LEARNING TO SIT DOWN: MY FIRST SIT 

THE easiest and laziest way I know to 
learn how to sit down is on a saddle 
horse. 

One can be as stupid, and use one's mind 
as little about it as one likes, but as one is 
practically driven when one is on a horse, to 
use one's mind some in sitting, and to use 
one's back because it bumps it so not to, al- 
most anybody approximates, in sheer desper- 
ation, on a horse, sooner or later, to a cor- 
rect idea of what sitting down is. 

The practical difficulty with learning to sit 
down on a horse is, that there is no way of 
keeping up what one has learned when one 
gets off. One cannot be always taking a 
horse around with one to sit down on, and 
there is nothing one can really seem to do, 
to make one's pew in church or one's seat in 
a theater, or one's chair at a desk, act lively 
enough. 

If the only way that is open to a man, of 
taking in the idea of sitting down, is by 
thumping the idea in, by fairly bumping the 
6x 



62 Invisible Exercise 

idea into his seat for him, it is not apt to go 
much further. 

One needs to take in the idea at the other 
end of one's spine more, and whether one 
likes it or not, the upshot of it always is, 
sooner or later, one finds one's self sternly 
and humbly beginning to practice at learning 
to sit down, in what seems (after a horse) 
a frightfully steady and rather insipid chair. 

After all the soreness and excitement one 
has had to remind one, and to encourage one 
to sit down better^ and all the rocking, sweat- 
ing and panting and scenery, sitting down in 
a plain chair and using one's mind to balance 
one's body with, without making a motion, 
turns out to be the thing one has to face and 
make the most of. 

At least this has been my experience. 

The first thing I found when I did this 
was, that while the new balance I learned on 
the horse was a thing I could not transfer, I 
had really learned it once for all, whether I 
could transfer it or not. 

I found I had learned what the correct 
balancing position the horse threw me into, 
was like, and how I felt in it when I got it. 

I had something to go by and I felt that 
when at last without the aid of a horse to 
powerfully throw me into a sitting balance, I 
began with a plain chair to throw myself 



M'^ First Sit 63 

there or rather tip myself there, I would 
at least know it when I got it, and I would 
know when I didn't get it. That would be 
something. 

The next thing I set out to do, of course, 
was obvious. 

I proceeded to see if there was not some: 
way I could learn to be as comfortable on a 
chair as on a horse. 



LEARNING TO SIT DOWN: MY SECOND SIT 

The first thing I discovered in this direc- 
tion that was of any real help or inspiration 
to me was in a Madison Avenue street car. 
I do not claim any credit for the discovery. 
The credit should be given to the Company. 
I was practically crowded into it. There 
wasn't room in Madison Avenue street cars 
not to discover it. All I really did myself 
was to let myself — like some kind of human 
tube-paste — be squeezed out through the ves- 
tibule of the car, and deposited on the corner 
of the edge of the seat by the motorman. 

I sat where I was squeezed to. That was 
all I contributed to the discovery. But being 
a curious person, naturally interested in fac- 
ing ahead and watching people not being 
quite run over, I sat turned forward, did not 
use the back of the seat, and fell at once be- 
cause there was nothing else to do, into bal- 
ancing myself. 

With my feet spread out and straddling a 
little and the car always jerking — always 
being suddenly pulled up by the bit as it 
64 



My Second Sit 65 

were — before I knew it, I began throwing 
myself — kept throwing myself over and over 
again — into a balance on my seat. Before 
I knew it I had discovered in the middle of 
Madison Avenue coming along for me every 
five minutes a perfect, dead-sure, inexpensive 
five-cent substitute for a saddle horse. 

It was quite literally before I knew it. 
Every time I entered a car, I found myself, 
whether it was crowded or not, making for 
the seat by the motorman. I went to it in- 
stinctively. I liked it. 

If I had been asked why I chose the seat, 
I would have said it was for the scenery. 

It was some weeks before I knew enough 
about myself or about sitting down, to know 
that the real reason I chose the corner of the 
edge of the joggly seat, was that it was prac- 
tically the only seat on earth I knew of yet, 
where I could make myself sit down as com- 
fortably as a horse could make me sit down. 

All I knew at the time was that I felt in- 
jured when somebody — a small boy usually 
— jumped into my small Interborough sad- 
dle for me and I had to put up with sitting 
in the long common soggy row of other 
people laid up against the red Brussels 
carpet-back inside. 

When there was nothing for it, and I had 



66 Invisible Exercise 

to sit with them on the regular bench or pew 
inside, I made as good an imitation on it, 
of sitting on my small saddle — my play rock- 
ing-horse outside — as I could. I sat on the 
extreme edge of the seat and balanced my- 
self. 



m 

I STRUGGLE WITH THE EASY CHAIR 

In learning how to break up an old habit 
of bodily position or movement and establish 
a new one, the first thing one naturally seeks 
to do is to avoid the conditions and circum- 
stances which are the most identified with the 
old habit, and which tend to make one forget 
the new one, and cultivate conditions and cir- 
cumstances that are so altogether new and 
different in themselves that one can think of 
the new habit in connection with them almost 
more easily than the old. 

I seemed to have had this experience in my 
new way of learning to sit down as I should. 

There were two things I could come near- 
est to sitting down on properly. The best 
was a horse because he powerfully threw me 
into taking a right sitting position. The next 
best was a piano stool because it kept me at 
least from leaning — from slumping into a 
wrong one. 

The establishing of a health habit espe- 
cially of a habit of deep subtle subconscious 
position or movement, turns necessarily on 
67 



68 Invisible Exercise 

getting and keeping one's own attention to 
what one wants. One has to do something 
that attracts one's attention rather loudly at 
first. 

This seems to have been the principle of 
psychology upon which I was unconsciously 
at work. After sitting six hours a day at a 
desk, sitting on a horse, or sitting on a glori- 
ous backless joggly seat in a street car, was 
so strikingly different from all I was used to 
in the way of sitting, that my old way not 
only felt awkward, but I kept being reminded 
of the new one because it was the one that 
worked. 

After this stage is once reached in making 
a transfer in middle life from an old sub- 
conscious habit to a new one, progress be- 
comes rapid. The pursuit of a line of least 
resistance, becomes a comfort, and a rational 
self-indulgence. 

Of course, when with a powerful horse to 
help me, I was practically tossed, almost dis- 
located, into a position where I involuntarily 
stretched my head forward and up and 
lengthened and widened my back, what was 
really happening was that my attention was 
being got and being held to the way I wanted 
to sit down, and from that point on, of 
course, the whole art of sitting down con- 



/ Struggle, with 'Easy Chairs 69 

sisted in finding more sedate substitutes, less 
violent ways of keeping myself reminded of 
how I preferred to sit. 

Later, when I got to the point where I was 
really preferring to sit in the better way 
without thinking of it one way or the other, 
I found myself let in for a whole new streak 
of parlor experiences in the houses of my 
friends, and strange adventures with easy 
chairs, which were not unilluminating. 

For quite a little while when I was let into 
a room and suddenly exposed as I entered 
the door, to a whole flock of easy chairs, I 
made a bee-line for the piano stool. It was 
my isle of safety. I sat down on it and held 
on to it for dear life. Nothing anybody 
could say would budge me from it until I 
started to say good-bye and made for the 
door. 

After two or three weeks I began branch- 
ing out a little tentatively from a piano stool 
now and then. I tried some of the more 
Presbyterian looking chairs at first. Then I 
grew bolder day by day and slipped over on 
to the edges of easy ones. 

Finally, as I was getting so that I could 
balance my back in almost any position — in 
any chair — I leaned back. 



IV 
REHEARSALS ON A STOOL 

A certain Spanish Princess in her memoirs 
boasts — boasts of it as part of her royal 
blood — that she has not leaned back in a 
chair for forty years. 

This general idea the Princess has had 
apparently of being a super-rested person in 
this bolt-up-right, stiffly splendid manner, may 
do for royalty, but to the ordinary plain man 
there is something a little melodramatic and 
showy about it. He likes to think he is more 
accomplished; that as a super-rested person, 
he is capable of being more limberly re- 
freshed. 

And while one would not want to point 
out to a Spanish Princess that perhaps it 
would be more elegant to be spirited in some 
more subtle way than sitting on a piano stool 
and being a ramrod of refreshment all the 
time, one still does like to believe one's spine 
does not need to be treated like some 
splendid piece of china, one has to sit just so 
with, never tip with, and never lean with, all 
one's life. 

70 



Rehearsals on a Stool 71 

But I will say this for the Spanish Prin- 
cess. The probabilities are that she has, and 
knows she has a more comfortable, more 
luxurious way of sitting — in spite of her 
looks — and more economical for the trouble, 
than most people. 

She has the main Idea — as far as she gets 
— of sitting comfortably. Nine American 
men and women out of ten today if they 
would begin tomorrow doing as she does, if 
they would get the first rudiments of enjoying 
and using a back to sit with, would soon be 
seen, week after week, month after month — 
millions of them all across this country — 
lining up and sitting on piano stools with her. 

There wouldn't be, in time, piano stools 
:enough to go around. The edges of chairs 
everywhere would be seen being used iiK 
houses every day every night, all over this 
country from Maine to California. 

I do not say I approve of it. It seems to 
me rather absurd. But it would be better 
than nothing. It would get people started. 

If people cannot believe that going into a 
room and sitting on the edge of a chair is a 
luxury after one has once learned the new 
substantial joy of resting one's self lightly on 
one's own back instead of hunting around for 
one from Grand Rapids, Michigan, all any- 



72 Invisible ^Exercise, 

one can say is — ^let them try it, try it a single 
month. Let them stop slumping to rest, and 
try sitting up to rest for four weeks. The 
plain brute matter of fact they would come 
up against is (any, dog, cat, woodchuck, 
squirrel or lion knows it) that the easiest 
way to sit down, is to sit up. 



REHEARSALS IN A MORRIS CHAIR 

The average American business man in 
middle life, who is naturally and legitimately 
tired in the evening, quite naturally says that 
what he sits in an easy chair for is to rest 
his back. 

So do I. But I have found that the thing 
for me to do in an easy chair to rest my back 
the most, is to lean back in it in such a way 
as not to slump it but to stretch it. 

I have not a word to say against leaning 
back. One can lean back in an easy chair as 
well as anywhere else. But in the first stage 
of learning how to sit up — when one is still 
learning to sit up even in a straight position 
— remembering to keep one's upper back 
where it belongs when in a leaning position, 
has difficulties. 

In learning how to sit down, everything 
turns on making one's self remember, and of 
course, the positions which keep one re- 
minded the most, are the ones to cultivate at 
first. 

Until they have got the idea and the idea 

73 



74 Invisible Exercise 

has set, the only really safe place for many 
people is a saddle horse, or a joggly seat, a 
piano stool or the edge of a chair. 

When I first got far enough along in sit- 
ting, to know when I succeeded and when I 
failed, and really enjoyed and preferred sit- 
ting as I should, I found the saddle horse 
more comfortable than the Morris chair, be- 
cause the horse kept me reminded of what 
I wanted to do. If at any moment I stopped 
remembering, the horse took me and threw 
me where I would. I was practically com- 
pelled, on a saddle horse, to put my head 
forward and up and widen and heighten my 
back in order to hold on. I had to sit bal- 
anced on a horse in order to sit there at all. 

In a Morris chair a man lets the chair do 
the balancing and the chair gets the benefit 
of it. He doesn't. 

It was in the third stage when I had passed 
the horse or joggly-seat stage, and the piano- 
stool stage, and was beginning to enjoy sit- 
ting in the new and balanced way, that I dis- 
covered the edge of a chair. 

I had never dreamed what a comfort the 
edge of a chair was! 

At first, of course, it must be admitted, it 
was a mere intellectual comfort. It was not 
long before sitting on the edge of a chair 



Rehearsals in a Morris Chair 75 

had become the surest and easiest way I knew 
of making almost any chair restful. 

There is nothing to do on the edge of a 
chair but balance. One's very self-indul- 
gence keeps one reminded. 

Gradually one's own back in its new posi- 
tion becomes so much more comfortable than 
any mere back belonging to a mere chair can 
be, that one finds trying to use very much 
more of a chair (at least while one is learn- 
ing) than the edge, seems self-sacrificing. 

When it is one's back one has been sitting 
on — one's own balanced back — and one de- 
liberately lets it go and with a dreadful sink- 
ing feeling slumps into the upholstery of a 
common American easy chair, one feels — one 
feels at once as if one had given up some- 
thing — as if one offered one's chair to a lady. 

One has let one's back go — what one 
knows how to sit with and enjoys sitting with 
— and one naturally misses it. 



VI 
PARLORS AND BACKS 

The easy chairs are all right. The trouble 
is with the people. Their backs are only 
educated enough to sit on stools and Wind- 
sors. Until education and self-discipline set 
in again, one almost feels as if easy chairs, 
as young people enter a room, ought to have 
placards on them, "Hints and Helps to 
Spinelessness." 

The first thing a man does when he is born 
is to insist on being born with his back, and 
the last thing he does when he dies is to 
stop his heart — let go of life with his back. 

The handle of a man's soul is his back, 
the one place where the spirit takes hold in 
one thought and one act, of the whole ma- 
terial content of a human being. 

This fact would seem to give great sim- 
plicity — an absolute, beautiful and almost 
terrible singleness — to the means a man may 
employ, if he wants to, for self-education and 
self-command, and the command and under- 
standing of others. 

I am sure it would be hard to overempha- 
76 



Parlors and Backs 77 

size it in its bearing upon all the problems 
of the human being today: The core of a 
man is his back. 

This is why I do not mind admitting that 
a modern parlor, when I see certain types of 
young people being daily exposed to it, wor- 
ries me. I catch myself going about with a 
kind of guilty, queer, old-uncle feeling toward 
all these flocks of young folks we have to- 
day, these hosts of lollers committing them- 
selves all unsuspecting to these great yawning 
monsters of upholstery one sees in every 
home — all these huge innocent-looking back- 
removers, these human-apple-corers taking 
them up — all the dear young people — into 
their capacious maws, softly, slowly uncon- 
cernedly chewing their backs up for them 
before their own eyes — rolling them off into 
soft and early graves. . . . 



vn 

LEARNING TO LOUNGE 

The best and most reasonable purpose a 
man can have in sitting in an easy chair, is 
that the easy chair is the most convenient 
place in most houses for learning to lie down. 

The critical time in learning to lie down — 
the time of perfecting one's new control for 
unconscious use during the night — comes 
when one is learning to lean. 

One comes home at night, has* one's dinner, 
gears the vital forces of the body for the 
evening, sits down, leans back in one's easy 
chair, and throws the body into neutral. 

When one is leaning one has the body 
geared to slip either way in a second, into 
lying down on the one hand or sitting up on 
the other. 

If one makes a miss in one's new control 
in lying in bed, one can slip back where one 
is surer of one's self and can get righted sit- 
ting. 

As in learning to run a car, the main prac- 
tice in self-control comes in changing the 
gears, the easy chair becomes in the evening 
78 



Learning to Lounge 79 

in a certain stage of learning, the most uni- 
versal means of getting hold of one's machine 
for the night that there is. 

When one has got to the point where, 
without violating one's new control, one can 
sit down and let one's self go — lean back on a 
chair — lying down and leaning the whole 
body on a bed naturally and rapidly follows. 

All that has to be looked out for in the 
easy chair is that while a man is leaning him- 
self, he shall keep balancing himself besides. 
He does this by leaning with one part of his 
back while he is still balancing with the other. 
He uses the lower part of the back to lean 
with and the upper part to balance with. 

The balance which he catches and enjoys 
when he sits erect, he continues when he 
leans. In other words, in a half-lying-down 
position, he still keeps on stretching, balanc- 
ing and exhilarating his spine. 

His spine, from the way he leans with it, 
while he is leaning, rests, stretches, and re- 
lieves itself, and thus rests, stretches, and 
relieves his whole body. 

Leaning in an easy chair thus becomes at 
last an act of skill — as manly an art as run- 
ning. 



8o Invisible. "Exercise 

(I would have liked to insert at the end of 
this chapter the full details and directions 
for the sit-down exercise to which these ad- 
ventures in sitting down are leading up. But 
it would be unfair to the reader for reasons 
that would be quite obvious after he had 
once mastered the new exercise to lay before 
him the full details of it at just this point. 
Until we have gone over together a little 
more of the background of the idea of the 
:exercise, the directions would be almost 
surely subject to misconstruction. 

If I followed my impulse and yielded to 
the reader^s natural desire to go right on up 
to the front and go into action, and pro- 
ceeded to give him full details, to have him 
before my eyes sitting down with a fierce and 
holy perfection in the very next chapter, all 
at once, I would really be arranging for him 
a delay, or at least a detour in getting where 
he wants.) 



Ill 

LYING DOWN EFFICIENTLY 



I 

LEARNING TO LEE DOWN 

LEARNING to lie down naturally divides 
itself off into two parts — night practice 
and day practice. 

Day practice consists in so carrying out the 
principle of correct lying, deliberately and 
consciously, while walking and sitting all day, 
that one starts up one's subconscious instinct 
of holding one's self right and wants to prac- 
tice it unconsciously all night. 

It seems a little like going out around at 
first, but the quick business short-cut in learn- 
ing to lie down and sleep, is sitting. One 
strikes through to the lying down and to 
sleep by discovering, working out, and prac- 
ticing the main idea in it while one sits. One 
need not wait to lie down and sleep. One 
need not take a minute out of one's day's 
work to practice consciously or unconsciously 
during the day, on lying down. One accumu- 
lates one's idea of lying down all day. One 
sits one's self to sleep. 

One also walks one's self to sleep. One 
does not need to follow a man home to bed, 
83 



84 Invisible Exercise 

watch him lie down and fall asleep, to know 
how he does it. 

One can tell what a man is like when he is 
asleep, usually, in public — almost anywhere 
or any time — by watching the way he walks. 



n 

LEARNING TO LIE DOWN: THE WIGGLE TEST 

The faults people have come to have In 
lying down cannot be observed very readily 
by watching people lie down. 

People who are making mistakes in lying 
down not only do not make their mistakes in 
public where one can see them, but the lying 
down mistakes themselves — even if they 
were made where one could study them — are 
more subtle and difficult to observe, to trace 
out and study than the same mistakes are, 
when made by people sitting or walking. 

In coming to what seems to me to be the 
fundamental principle of lying down, I have 
received the most help from people who 
wiggle and from watching the way they sit 
down. They were easy to pick out. People 
who walk prominently sit down prominently. 

People who wiggle do not ever really stop. 
They are merely more subtle about it In lying 
than they are in walking and in sitting. The 
facilities for wiggling when one Is sitting 
down, are not great but the Impulse hangs 
over, and it Is always the people who have 
what are called sway-backs — whose backs 
8s 



S6 Invisible Exercise, 

seem in a kind of vague way to be trying 
as well as they can to follow and imitate their 
feet — who have the most marked difficulties 
in learning to lie down. 

People who wiggle and thump, sog when 
they sit, lie down inefficiently, and sleep 
slowly and heavily. 

If I can put down in so many words just 
what it is people are doing wrong when they 
wiggle, I shall be saying what they are doing 
wrong when they lie down. 

Perhaps the true way to state what hap- 
pens and bring out the fundamental principle 
that is violated is this. 

People who wiggle are usually people — if 
one studies them — who wiggle because in- 
stead of letting their backs carry them they 
are trying to carry their backs. They wiggle 
because — if one must say it — they are trying 
to carry their backs with their stomachs. As 
this is naturally a very difficult thing to do, 
even for a very active man, of course they 
wiggle. They have to. 

The same people sit on their stomachs 
usually. They try to do everything with 
them. One does not know why, but there 
seems to be something about their stomachs 
apparently that interests them more. 

By sitting on a stomach, one means that 



The Wiggle Test 87: 

the stomach, not being duly protected and 
held up by the back, is where it does not be- 
long, and that being just where it is when 
one sits down, there is nothing else one can 
do with it. Not being able to sit down be- 
side it, one sits down on it, of course. The 
poor thing is there. 

The real problem most people have in sit- 
ting down, is what to do with the stomach. 
This problem of not sitting on the stomach 
is one which has to be met by the angular 
and spare people — though they are quite un- 
conscious of it — quite as much as by the ro- 
tund and pendulous. 

The difficulties which, very often, the over- 
accumulated man has in knowing what to do 
with his stomach may be more obvious. One 
is always seeing a fleshy man either sitting on 
it deliberately or sitting on the edge of a 
chair with it hung carefully out in front a 
little out of his way, so that he won't have 
to. As a matter of fact very lean men — the 
majority of lean men who suffer from dys- 
pepsia — have much more trouble than fleshy 
men, though, of course, they do not have to 
be so confiding about it. Sitting on the 
stomach (or if not sitting on it, at least lean- 
ing forward on it to rest the back) has come 
in America to be a common national evil. 



88 Invisible Exercise 

It IS not that people like it — sitting on 
their stomachs in this way — they find it ex- 
tremely uncomfortable. Most people who 
do it do not even know they are doing it — 
or if they do, they do not know what else 
they can do — and there are very few who do 
not have, at best, a very vague loose idea 
about a stomach anyway — how it should 
look, how it should feel, and where it should 
be kept. 

One need not go into details but the gist 
of the truth put in a word is, that a stomach 
should look convex and that it should feel 
concave. It should feel and hourly keep 
feeling as if it was making itself, all the 
while, pleasantly and gratefully less and less 
convex. This constant inward insistent pres- 
sure is the pressure of life. The moment it 
lets up, even in a slight degree, the stomach 
is distended, falls into a place where it is in 
the way, and what with all the other disa- 
greeable things that are happening to it in- 
side — and being sat on besides— there is dif- 
ficulty. 

The way the difficulty should be met is by 
knowing just where a stomach should be kept 
and keeping it there. 

By lengthening and heightening the back 
and increasing the room for it, it would soon 



The. Wiggle Test 89 

habitually be drawn in and pulled out of the 
way, and sitting down would cease to be, as 
it is for many people — for most people — an 
elaborate preparation all day for lying down 
inefficiently. 

There are various substitutes people who 
use their stomachs to sit on, try. 

Sometimes they try crowding them out of 
the way. Doctors in extreme cases shore 
them up with a brace which presses the ab- 
domen in and up from beneath. This brace 
is kept in position by a strap going around 
the curve in the lower back. This method 
not only takes the power of the natural spring 
in the abdomen away, but by bearing down 
on the back in its weakest place, increases at 
the same time the already dangerous curve 
in the back, shortens the spine and the life 
of the patient at the same time. 

Having the power of doing this — of sitting 
down with their own backs and of holding 
their abdomens in place with their own backs 
— deliberately taken away from them by sub- 
stituting a brace, sitting down week by week 
and year by year becomes naturally more tir- 
ing to them, and the brace they wear, of 
course, being a dead thing instead of a living 
muscle, has to be pulled tighter and tighter. 

They have to rest after sitting down, 



90 Invisible Exercise 

longer and longer every day until they lie 
down altogether. 

Other people try wearing belts. Others 
pretend to wear belts. Men who want to go 
without waistcoats, but who are sensitive and 
made uncomfortable and given a bearing- 
down sensation, compromise by wearing belts 
and suspenders both. But suspenders, while 
as far as they go, they may help in the right 
direction, are merely relieving and not re- 
moving the difficulty. 

Other people use hymn books. These 
people do it usually, not as being desperate, 
but as being more comfortable, and as re- 
lieving them from the responsibility, of 
course, of having to support themselves with 
their backs any more than can be helped. 

The hymn book by giving pressure and 
stimulus to the upper spine, helps it to draw 
in and draw up the stomach, and to pull in 
the curve in the back, and so gives relief. 
And, of course, I am not finding fault with 
it. One might as well get all one can out of 
a hymn book, and I certainly would use one 
when in church if I had to. But it is a mis- 
take to have to. The only thorough way to 
<deal with the situation — for which, of course, 
pew builders are partly to blame — is to take 
a specific back-coordinating exercise. 



The Wiggle Test 91 

If before going to church one takes this 
drill, and gets one's back coordinated and 
happy, one feels like using one's hymn book 
to praise God with or to sing with, rather 
than as a support for one's less spiritual 
nature. 

Anything that accentuates or fronts up in 
one's mind the conception of sitting as a 
pleasurable delicate balancing feat, as a bal- 
ancing comfort, or even as a poise-amusement 
— helps one to sit. Then the sitting effi- 
ciently makes one prefer lying efficiently. 

The way one would sit down with a water 
jar on one's head — If one could Imagine one's 
self trying to do it — would bring one as near 
to getting the right conception and the right 
intention in sitting down, as one could prob- 
ably get. 

One would begin not by making an effort, 
but by being clear-headed. 

In sitting down with a jar on one's head, 
the first thing one would have to do, would 
be not to confuse what one sits down on, 
with what one sits down with. What one 
sits down with is the upper back. What one 
sits down on — one reminds one's self — is the 
lower end of the back! And, of course, the 
precise thing one has to do when one sits 



92 Invisible Exercise 

down with a jar, is to see that the jar is on 
one end and not on the other. 

These are all matters, not of effort, but of 
clearheadedness. 

The one way one can sit down accurately 
and without the jar on the wrong end, is by 
reducing the curve in the middle of the 
back and letting the upper part of one's back 
go up to where it is in a sufficiently high 
position to balance the whole body. 

The inaccuracy of aim and calculation with 
which people sit down, is merely a symptom 
of the whole body's being thrown out of true. 
Nearly everything they do with the body — 
especially everything they do inside — is as 
inaccurate as their sitting. 

So it is not too much to say that the most 
dignified, the most spiritual and intellectual 
thing for most people to do next in this 
world, is to learn how to sit down. 

One hesitates at first to recommend it to 
people, because one feels they may think it is 
not interesting. But anybody can see that 
learning how to sit down is absorbingly inter- 
iesting and entertaining to a baby, and I do 
not believe there is a grown man living, who 
when he once sees he has not really learned 
how to sit down — once sees that as long as 
he is a mere thumper, going around with his 



The Wiggle Test 93 

seat thumping at things, endangering his own 
life as well as other peoples' furniture — will 
not find learning how to sit down as interest- 
ing as a baby does. 

Sitting down accurately, sitting down with 
a fleck, aiming one's body at a chair, is quite 
as interesting and intelligent a feat, or game 
of skill and quite as much fun as aiming a 
tennis ball, and far more important and use- 
ful, because a man cannot aim the whole out- 
side of his body at anything, without auto- 
matically and by the same act, aiming every- 
thing inside his body with it, and having it 
go just where it belongs. 



m 

LEARNING TO LIE DOWN: THE HANG TEST 

Like learning to sit and to walk, learning 
to lie down consists in studying out — each 
man for himself, with his own kinesthesia — 
lying down accurately; that is, lying in the 
most easy, the most precisely balanced posi- 
tion for him for all the organs of his body. 

As when one is in bed one reaches six feet 
across, and only reaches one foot up, it is 
obviously a more delicate and subtle test of 
one's inner sense of balancing — of one's 
sense of coordination — ^knowing whether one 
is plumb or not when one is being six feet 
wide and one foot high, as easily and as ac- 
curately as one would know, standing up six 
feet in the air. 

Learning to balance one's self lying down 
therefore, necessarily turns on one's doing 
one's main practice when one is wide awake 
and when one is standing up on one's feet, 
getting the idea, getting the sense of it when 
one is in one's full senses. 

The whole subject of lying down has to 
be treated as a wide awake subject. One has 
to stand up to understand it. 

94 



The Hang Test 95 

It would be a mistake for me to rush my 
reader to hed too soon. 

It is an uncoordinating and tiring thing to 
walk until one knows how to stand, and it is 
dangerous to try to sit down until one knows 
how to sit up ; and lying down — at least until 
one has waked up one's spine, has learned to 
make one's spine put one's stomach up care- 
fully for the night just where it belongs — is 
the most dangerous of all. 

It is true that a baby learns to lie down 
first. But a baby has no bad habits. 

A full-grown man changing or taking back 
a life habit of lying down, naturally reverses 
the baby's order and goes backward; has to 
begin his new habit of balance in more active 
and conscious motions like sitting and walk- 
ing. 

Then, possibly as lying down is much 
harder (has to be done, that is, for the most 
part when one is actually asleep) he can hope 
to learn to lie down — even lie down asleep — 
without losing his balance. 

One does not exactly want to say In so 
many words that what a man has to do in 
learning to lie down is to learn to aim his 
body at a bed. But this is what it practically 
amounts to. He has to get the hang of lying 
down. And the most direct and quick short- 



g6 Invisible Exercise 

cut that can be used to get the hang of lying 
down is to heap up in one's self such a habit 
of being coordinated during the day that one 
finds it hard to stop at night. So I am dwell- 
ing a minute longer on tests and methods, or 
ways one can use to get so used during the 
day to one's hang in walking, and to one's 
hang in sitting, that when night comes, one 
naturally goes up to one's chamber, takes off 
one's clothes quietly, and as a matter of 
course, hangs one's self up to sleep. 

As before — I am telling my own story in 
this regard, and the tests that work with me. 

The next test for accurate and efficient 
lying down to be considered is the test of the 
feet. 



IV 

PEOPLE WHO THUMP 

I found myself being told the other day 
in the public prints by a prominent manufac- 
turer that I take on the average eight thou- 
sand steps a day, and that every one of these 
steps is a shock to my system, and that I 
really ought to wear little rubber cushions on 
my heels. 

As the prominent manufacturer (it was in 
the back pages of a magazine) had spent 
seven or eight thousand dollars that very day 
on it — on telling me among other people 
about the condition I was in — I could not but 
be impressed with the fact that probably, if 
he had spent so much money on it, he really 
must have looked the matter up and it must 
be so. 

I am not saying it is or it isn^t so, at this 
point. I am merely saying that if it is so, 
I am going to face it and see to it that it is 
not so any longer. 

When it is deliberately and publicly pointed 
out to me at great expense in this way, that I 
am really at best after all, a rather weak 
and foolish person in getting hold of myself, 

97 



98 Invisible Exercise 

that I haven't even the brains to put my foot 
'down on the ground, that I have been too 
lazy after fifty years' practice to learn to 
walk, I hate to confess to myself that I must 
give up — actually give up being a regular 
human being and be pieced out for the last 
twenty years of my life with slabs of gum 
pasted on my heels. 

Other people can speak for themselves; 
but I must say, for one, I do hate to admit 
I have come to it. I have always expected 
to give out in places. I am reconciled in 
time, of course, to being obliged to admit 
false teeth; but, after all, as things are now, 
false teeth do not show and are comparatively 
private. I would hate to wear false teeth 
on my feet. I would almost rather be seen 
I going about in public with crutches than with 
'cushions on my heels. If one wears a crutch, 
anyone can see that there is some sense in it, 
that something has happened to one, some- 
thing one could not help. But wearing rub- 
ber heels is too meek. It is like making a 
confession — a double public confession any- 
one can see walking behind one — that one 
has given up on one's self, given up on one's 
mind, that one's mind has given out before 
it even gets to one's feet. 

I did not know it at the time, but in my 



People Who Thump 99 

own personal process of learning to lie down 
the thing that really gave me my start was 
a kind of stupid, not particularly thoughtful, 
obstinacy about my feet and my brains, a 
kind of righteous wrath at being called names 
for the way I walked. I spent several months 
in talking back to an advertisement. If I 
hadn't the brains to make my feet reach the 
ground — reach the ground just precisely, to 
a hundredth of an inch of where I want them 
to, if I was not clever enough to walk without 
jarring everything inside me out of place and 
without shaking a house — I proposed to 
know why. I might not know much, per- 
haps, in this mortal life, but I did not pro- 
pose to be cheated, before I died, out of 
knowing at least how to walk. I proposed 
to have for my life with my body a certain 
easy conscious habitual feeling of being the 
one in command. I would step as lightly as 
a rooster! Who should stop me? I would 
try, in walking, to come up to a cat. 

I cut the advertisement out of the mag- 
azine, put it up where I could see it, made 
myself read it in every possible way, up and 
down, sideways, backward and forward and 
between the lines — but especially backward. 
If the man who paid out the eight thousand 
dollars on making me think, — who gave me 



loo Invisible Exercise 

my start — could only begin to know what he 
has done for me, — and all for eight thousand 
dollars — he would be filled, like Wordsworth 
with the primrose at the river's brim, with 
thoughts too deep for words. 

I need not at this time go into details and 
tell the entire story of what the advertise- 
ment did for me, and of my learning to lie 
down, but the final bottom principle of the 
experience may be said to be this : The more 
one does to make it necessary — even pain- 
fully necessary — to calculate one's step and 
measure and true one's body as one walks, 
the faster one learns to lie down. 

When a grown man is actually engaged 
like a baby in not putting his foot down ac- 
curately, in making a vague moofy guess at 
where the floor is, the last thing, or most 
dangerous thing for him to do — is to do any- 
thing that will remove the jar, the one thing 
he has left that reminds him of what he is 
letting himself be like. The thing for a man 
to do when he finds that he puts his foot 
down with a jar is not to clap on a rubber 
heel and forget what is the matter with him. 
The thing to do is to put on a steel heel — 
a harder heel than ever. Then thump and 
think. 

What the jar is doing its best to tell him, 



People Who Thump loi 

and to keep telling him, is that he is walking 
out of plumb, breathing and digesting 
crooked, and that his lungs and stomach and 
his other organs, are all trying to do what 
they do for him, out of true. 

It would be better for him, from the point 
of view of getting his own attention to the 
condition he is in, to wear little torpedoes 
on his heels than bits of rubber, fooling him 
into not knowing as he goes about, that he is 
only a half-awake man and that the spring in 
him has gone dead. 

Rubber heels should be worn by people 
who have given up on walking, by the old, or 
by the contentedly decrepit of all ages, or 
by beginners in learning to walk. 

My own personal feeling is that as by far 
the great majority of the American people 
are beginners, twenty pairs of rubber heels 
should be sold where one is being sold today. 

If I had my way — if I had a free hand 
in getting a hundred million people to believe 
me and save words — I would have taken 
around and distributed tomorrow morning 
to every home in the country, a hundred mil- 
lion pairs of rubber heels. 

Everybody but babies should wear them a 
week, just to get the idea, the bare idea, of 
how they ought to feel when they walk. 



PEOPLE WITH LIGHT HEADS AND LIGHT FEET 

At twelve o'clock noon every day, every- 
body from Maine to California should 
change his shoes, put on a pair without rub- 
ber heels and all the afternoon and evening 
try to see, as he was walking without rubber 
heels, how close he could come to imitating 
the feeling he had in the morning, when he 
was walking with them. 

Same the next day and the next day and 
the next until the difference between the morn- 
ing and the afternoon feeling in walking, 
didn't amount to anything. 

This would be, perhaps, the quickest way 
to give a nation an idea, have a hundred 
million people all have a chance to have the 
rather wonderful and unexpected idea of 
what a light step is like. They could see 
what they are missing — have the rubber-heel 
feeling taught to them by paying for it all 
the morning, and then in the afternoon, mak- 
ing for nothing with their old shoes as good 
an imitation of it as they can, by practicing 
at not thumping themselves, by balancing or 



Light Heads and Light Feet 103 

aiming the body at the ground — by not allow- 
ing themselves any thump for a rubber heel 
to take up. 

This would be, perhaps, the quickest way 
to give a nation an idea of what it would be 
really like to walk. With a national demon- 
stration to people with rubber heels they can 
buy, we would soon see a whole people get- 
ting back to the free rubber heels they were 
born with. 

In the course of a few years while many 
millions more rubber heels would be used 
than now, they would be used not as invalid 
supports, as reliefs, as one-inch crutches. 
What the rubber heels would be used for, 
would be to express an ideal — a new or ideal 
physical experience which could not possibly 
be expressed in words. People can get the 
ideal by having it pasted on their very heels, 
where every step reminds them of it and they 
cannot miss it. Then when they have once 
experienced the ideal — had it tipped off to 
them on their heels and worked up to them 
through their legs — they will know how they 
are going to feel when they take the trouble 
not to thump when they walk. 

But, of course, the main purpose in learn- 
ing to walk with a light step goes far deeper 
than a mere pleasure and ease in walking. 



104 Invisible Exercise 

Most people only walk an hour or so a day 
and they sit ten and lie down and sleep eight. 

If a man passes the test of carrying his 
head lightly and his feet lightly in walking 
he may then be said to be ready to learn how 
to do the most difficult, most accomplished 
and most rewarding exercise a man ever takes 
in this world — that of lying down to sleep. 

What walking with a light step does is to 
pull the body together to sit and wind it up 
to sleep. 

Walking thus becomes a kind of coordina- 
tion-thermometer. At least this has been my 
experience. Walking lightly has given me a 
standard to use and depend on from day to 
day, and I have got into the habit of consult- 
ing my head — the degree of lightness in my 
head and my feet as I walk — as a register of 
just how much I know I am about. 

And the more I know what I am about 
from head to foot in the day, the less I need 
to know in the night. 



What I have to say about lying down effi- 
ciently and sleeping fast, may be best summed 
up, perhaps, in the following highly moral, 
but beautiful lines composed for the occasion, 
which I am thinking of offering to Mr. Cecil 



Light Heads and Light Feet [105 

Sharp e to be sung in chorus by the people 
who are dancing those old quaint, hearty, 
bouncing morris dances. 

The idea would be to have people dance 
it out illustratively, singing in nice loud 
thumpy voices, all the while 

OH! OH! OH! OH! MY! 

A Warning to the Young 

An Ode 

Oh! Oh! Oh! My! 

Walk with a wiggle ! 

Walk with a thump ! 

Sag when you sit ! 

Lie down with a bump! 

Sleep with a slump! 

Oh! Oh! Oh, my! Bye, bye! 

Sleep slow, sleep long! 

Sleep boringly, sleep snoringly! 

Sleep heavily, not cleverly ! 

Like a stone in the bud! 

Like a turtle in mud! 

Whoever you are 

Sleep with a thud! 

Wake with a jar! 

Out of your beds ! 

Motes in your eyes ! 

Beams in your heads! 

To breakfast and business hie you! 

Coffee and paper by you ! 

Eat like a lump ! 

Sit in a hump ! 

Then clump, clump, clump, 



io6 Invisible Exercise 

Take the air 

To your business chair . . . 

Clump, clump 

Ump, ump 

Bump! 

Oh! Oh! Oh! My!! 

What I have wanted to do in these chap- 
ters is to take this poetry — real poetry 
though it is — and before I get through, one 
line after the other, make sense of it. 

I can assure the reader that in spite of the 
music, it is not all in the air, and that there 
is stern stuffing in it. 

To Whom It May Concern 

Of course, as the reader already knows, 
I am doing my best in this book to dramatize 
if I can, and even make catching if I can, 
the idea of inhibition, of stopping to think, 
of conceiving and visualizing an action before 
the action as a means of hurrying it. 

But I do not think it is fair for an author, 
just because he is in the middle of his own 
book, to take advantage of people, and if 
there happen to be any of my readers who 
have just a common plain every-day Ameri- 
can hankering in their souls not to Sleep 
Fast and not to get the Attention of Their 



Light Heads and Light Feet 107 

Own Bodies in the next few chapters, and 
want to swing on to the details of the Lie- 
down Exercise and begin lying down effi- 
ciently at once, whether they can sleep fast or 
not, I might as well confide to them that they 
will find the Lie-Down Exercise (God help- 
ing them and at their own risk) on page 175 
in the Drill Book, just after the chapters 
they propose to skip on Getting the Attention 
of the Body. 



IV 
SLEEPING FAST 



I 

THE TRUTH ABOUT SLEEP 

npHERE is a certain stage of deliciousness 
•*• in sleep — a degree and kind of sleep a 
man would almost knock a man down for 
waking him up out of — a sleep a man would 
all but die for, go to hell for, to have ten 
minutes longer. 

Nearly everybody gets his touch now and 
then of this bottomless immemorial sleep — 
sleep from out of the depths of childhood 
and eternity. 

When a man gets this, he touches bottom, 
he gets the truth about sleep. 

A man who really believes or acts as if he 
believed that sleep like this is not for him, 
who lets himself slip into the habit of looking 
upon sleep as a mere relief, a kind of dump 
of forgetfulness he puts himself out on for 
the night, is not only not being spirited, he 
is not even being matter of fact and practical. 
He is off on his facts about himself and about 
human nature and what makes human nature 
work and what brings things successfully to 
pass. 



:ii2 Invisible 'Exercise. 

How is he going to be able in the thick of 
the fight of his life, to get what he wants out 
of a day — even know what it is he wants to 
get out of a day, to say nothing of getting it 
— if he cannot get as much out of a night 
as a baby does? 

In a civilization in which men are racing 
with machines, there is nothing more business- 
like a man ever does, than sleep. Everything 
else a man does well, comes out of his sleep. 
He comes out of his sleep himself. 



n 

A RELIGION FOR GOING TO BED 

I want to sleep fast. I believe that if a; 
man works out rightly the position he sits 
and walks and lives in, avoids strains, waste! 
motions, keeps the right position, runs his 
machine without friction all day, his machine 
won't need to be put up for repairs eight or 
nine hours every night. He will get as much 
sleep in six or seven hours as he does now in 
nine. 

Why should a man take out thirty solid 
years in his life, and spend them in bed, when 
twenty will do as well? 

Highly coordinated — that is highly con- 
centrated — work in the day gives highly con- 
centrated sleep in the night. 

With two extra hours a day saved out of 
every night by sleeping fast, and two hours 
saved out of every day by doing more work 
in less time, I would be able, whatever kind 
of man my job requires me to be, to save out 
and to spend twelve years of my life scattered 
along four hours a day, in being any kind of 
man I like. 

"3 



114 Invisible. Exercise 

Hardly a day passes but I fall to thinking 
of it, of what it would mean to me, if L could 
read the books I put off and am too tired to 
read, if I could know the men I cannot save 
time to know, and who cannot save time to 
know me. 

It would be a new kind of a world, if one 
could live in it like this. One could know 
one's children too, even. 

Seventy years with two hours a day added 

3^5 



730 hours saved a year 

730 a year 
70 years 



51,100 hours in a life. 

With one's two hours extra a day one 
could add fifty-one thousand hours to one's 
life. One could sit up from ten to twelve — 
;every night. 

One-twelfth of seventy years would be 
saved. 

One would save six solid years out of one's 
days and six solid years out of one's nights. 

One could take this extra time scattered 
along, of course, getting one's life-job over 
with quicker, or one could take the whole 



A Religion for Going to Bed 115 

:extra twelve years together, add it on to the 
end of a life just as one would have to let it 
go. It would be quite a spell — twelve years 
— ^put it all in a lump — all extra and at the 
end of a life. 

Most busy men who live with their brains 
make a mistake in making a rule of exercis- 
ing hard and sleeping long as a means of 
keeping fit. 

A better rule to give one's self would be: 
Exercise softly and sleep fast. Take the es- 
sence of exercise. 

The essence of exercise is a balance of mo- 
tion in rest — coordination. 

The essence of sleep is the balance of rest 
in motion — coordination. 

The thing to work for is one's power of 
coordination, one's power of putting meaning 
and order into what one's mind does with 
one's body. 

If I learn — by the way I sit and walk — to 
put in more meaning per hour when I am 
awake; if I do what I do with more accuracy, 
more sense, with less lost motion and friction, 
I will need less sleep. 

Living faster must logically involve sleep- 
ing faster. If one can put nine hours' work 
into seven, one can put nine hours' sleep into 
seven. 



gjl6 Invisible Exercise 

Instead of going to bed at ten and having 
nine hours of soggy sleep presented to me, I 
propose to take seven; sit up to twelve and 
get up as early as I like. I always like a 
day before anybody has used it and after 
[everybody else has got through with it. The 
best parts of days are the ends of them. Al- 
most any man's house is heaven, when every- 
body else has gone to bed at night, and before 
anybody has got up. 



in 

JUST WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ONE SLEEPS FAST 

In a very difficult and very strange posi- 
tion — what looks like an entirely horizontal 
position — one hangs one's self up to sleep; 
that is to say, one does the precise thing with 
one's body that one does standing up, and 
that one does in walking, and that one does 
in sitting up. 

In sitting one pulls the stomach up to 
where one is not sitting on it. In walking 
one pulls it up to where one is not walking 
around it, and in standing, to where one is not 
leaning on it. In the same way by lengthen- 
ing one's spine one pulls the stomach up to 
where one stops leaning on it and being sup- 
ported by it — hangs it where it hangs easily 
— and lets the body rest. 

As one sits accurately and steps lightly, one 
hangs one's self lightly up to sleep and sleeps 
lightly. 

In sleeping lightly as in running lightly, 
one gets on faster. 

A great many persons go through life 
wondering if there will ever come a time be- 
117 



ii8 Invisible Exercise 

fore they die when they can possibly get 
caught up in their sleep. They think they 
will have to take a year off, to want to get up 
in the morning. 

But this is not necessary. To want to get 
up early tomorrow morning, step lightly to- 
day. 

Run lightly to run fast. Lie down lightly 
to sleep fast. 

It is obvious that if one takes a position of 
holding one's self for an entire night in which 
one has to support one's self instead of hang- 
ing one's self, one has to sleep heavily and 
slowly. 

As one has so much more to attend to in 
sleeping, it naturally takes several hours 
longer to attend to it. 

People w^ho have to plug and thump along 
all day— -who even when they are wide awake 
plug along — and who cannot keep up to 
themselves all day can hardly hope to catch 
up in the night. 

It takes them too long, the way they do it. 
A good sleep is the body's lightest way of 
running — of running. And if people will 
walk in their sleep they must expect to take 
extra time for sleeping. 

Sleep is the shrewdest, the most incredibly 
competent, the most nicely calculated feat of 



What Happens Sleeping Fast 119 

sheer efficiency and economy of which a 
human being is capable. 

A man's sleep is his climax of being, his 
triumph of light-running, of supreme effort- 
lessness, perfected motion and coordination. 
Considered from the point of view of what 
he expends for what he gets, a man's great 
moments in this mortal life as a created 
being, are when he is asleep. 



IV 

THE ART OF STEERING ONE'S SLEEP 
THE ART OF LIKING TO GET UP 

We had a waitress once who was with us 
when I was for the most part away — but I 
always remember her. 

Two things stood out about her. One was 
the way she kept my breakfast waiting be- 
cause she was sleepy in the morning, and the 
other was the way she went through a door. 
The sleepiness in the morning I took as an 
injury, her going through a door as an amuse- 
ment. No alarm clock this side of a cathe- 
dral bell seemed to make any impression 

on . And when I sat down at the table 

and greeted her I was not cheerful. Then I 
would watch her trying to go through a door. 
I do not know what it was. It just inter- 
iested me to see her begin aiming at the door 
eight feet away and try. That was all. And 
it made me feel better. 

If anyone had asked me to carry my inter- 
est further in these two facts about , 

asked me if I saw any connection between her 
aim at a door and her getting up in the morn- 
ing, I would not have seen any, at the time. 



Steering One^s Sleep 1 2 1, 

But it was not many days after I began 
taking my lie-down exercises when it all came 
over me that her hacking off the edges of a 
door with her hips when she went through, 
and her sleeping past her alarm clock, were 
one and the same thing, and that one logically 
and inevitably came out of the other. 

One cannot overemphasize or overclarify 
this conception in one's mind, in learning the 
art of sleeping fast. People who lose their 
balance even when they are conscious and 
erect, lose their balance when they lie down. 
Their organs being clumsy, out of balance, 
slightly out of shape and slightly mislaid 
when they are awake, they are clumsy with 
them when they sleep. 

They naturally have to lie down on their 
backs longer and sleep longer to get properly 
stretched. 

Perhaps I need not say in bringing to a 
close this chapter on balancing and sleep, that 
sleeping enough longer to stretch one's back 
and get one's balance seems to me a very 
superficial and slovenly way to learn to sleep. 

Merely sleeping more as a substitute for 
knowing how to sleep, is an evasion. 

The thing one wants to do to hit off one's 
balance for sleep in the night, is to try aiming 
at floors, doors and chairs all day. Stopping 



122 Invisible Exercise 

to keep one's balance — not letting the habit 
of losing one's balance heap up during the 
day to be dealt with at night — is the only way 
that is thorough and that really works. 

The first thing that happened to me when 
I had really learned all over again to walk 
with light feet, and sit down with my own 
back instead of the back of a chair, and to lie 
down with my back balanced at night, was 
that I wanted to get up at four instead of 
seven in the morning. 

Of course, I didn't. I just lay there and 
enjoyed feeling how fine it was to be able to, 
and to like to, and to not have to. 



JUST WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ONE SLEEPS SLOW 

DIRECTIONS FOR NOT LETTING IT 

HAPPEN 

There are two directions for this, the first 
of which the reader has just had. 

First. To balance or coordinate the 
body when lying down uncon- 
scious and asleep all night, prac- 
tice balancing the body when 
standing, walking or sitting, when 
conscious all day. 

Second. Lie awake when necessary and 
practice balancing the body at 
night. A man should have an 
exercise he takes when he wakes 
up or before he falls asleep. He 
should take a little exercise in ly- 
ing down and arranging his back, 
in putting his stomach where it 
belongs and where it is safe for 
him to allow it to be while he is 
gone off to sleep. 

If I were asked to give one or two brief 
rules by which a man could come at an ex- 
ercise of this kind and be sure it was right, 
they would be : 

123 



124 Invisible Exercise 

First, Beg, borrow or supply a baby. 
(One cannot refer people to a 
baby too often in a book like 
this.) Everything there is to 
learn about getting into position 
for sleeping fast can be learned 
from a baby lying awake on his 
back in his crib. 

Second. Watch the baby for pointers, try 
his ideas out and keep coming 
back. 

In taking a specific drill, when one wakes 
up in the night, for sleeping fast, the main 
thing one wants to do is to imitate in bed the 
light step one has when one walks down the 
street. One wants to come as near as one 
can get to a light step when one is lying down. 

The best imitation, of course, of a light 
step lying down is the baby's. 

One can be more sedate about it than the 
baby is. One need not be showy in carrying 
out the idea, perhaps, but the whole secret 
of getting out of lying down and sleeping 
every inch there is in it, is the baby's way of 
lying on his back and kicking in his crib. 

A baby begins his walking — begins getting 
his leg-control — in bed. He rehearses flat 
on his back the way he is going to walk. 
And the main idea he keeps rehearsing of 
course — an idea grown people quite generally 



What Happens Sleeping Slow 125 

overlook — Is the control of the legs by the 
back. 

The only difference In the relation of the 
legs to the back in walking and lying down, 
is that In walking one lifts the legs and feet 
along and in lying down one lifts them up. 
If one Is taking the drill In winter it answers 
every purpose to lift them three or four 
inches under the bedclothes. When the con- 
trol becomes perfect, one can do It Invisibly. 
All one has to do is keep remembering that 
it Is what one does above the hip which de- 
termines the lightness and perfection of the 
control below it. It Is really almost, In the 
feeling of It, in the conception of it, as one 
does It, as if one were lifting the legs with 
Thought — with the head, with the lever that 
comes out of the head. 

With the abdomen and the legs properly 
subordinated to the back — to the lever that 
comes out of the head — one soon finds one's 
self feeling the same new Incredible lightness 
in the feet and the legs as one lifts them in 
bed that one felt in walking. The feet and 
the legs lift themselves and the bedclothes 
together as if neither of them were there. 

With the back In full control after due 
practice, effort becomes not only unnecessary 
but impossible. One could not make an effort 



126 Invisible Exercise 

if one tried. One might as well try, when 
one is floating, to float harder. 

Of course, if one becomes effortless with 
one's legs, way down to one's feet, one's 
whole body in between becomes effortless, 
becomes so coordinated, so under single con- 
trol, that with a flash of a single desire one 
falls asleep, and sleeping with everything just 
where it belongs, and without friction, one 
sleeps fast. 

Effort is the attempt of Nature to over- 
come in a man the false position in which he 
makes himself do a thing. If he does a thing 
in a wrong position Nature makes him work. 

It seems a pity to work lying down, to get 
one's self all tired out by the way one sleeps, 
but people do it — hundreds of millions of 
them are doing it every night — because they 
are not sufficiently informed about themselves 
to know what it means. 

The minute a man finds he is making an 
[effort in doing something as simple as sitting 
'down or walking or going to sleep, he 
should face what Nature is trying to do with 
him. Effort in what a man is doing is Na- 
ture's way of calling him a fool to his face, 
of criticising him all over his body, and trying 
to get his attention. 

If a man feels tired when he walks, has to 



IV hat Happens Sleeping Slow 127 

try to sit, Scrooges himself up to sleep, he 
should at once feel personally accused, should 
make himself see just what he is about and 
act like a gentleman and a scholar. 

What the gentleman and the scholar finds 
IS this. 

Lying down for an efficient sleep, when one 
once analyzes it and sees precisely what one 
Is about, consists In imitating In a fuU-lengtK 
and horizontal fashion, one's new way of 
walking, leaning and sitting. 

What one undertakes to do is to come as 
near as one can get to walking in bed, to 
sitting on a piano stool in bed, and to leaning 
back in a chair in bed. On a piano stool 
one sits up to rest. In an easy chair one 
leans up to rest and, of course, when one 
rests efficiently— rests one's utmost In lying 
down — one is lying up ! 

One's back is up to sleep. 

The relation, that is the coordination, the 
perfect connecting up of the back, the abdo- 
men and the feet. Is the same in all three of 
the great necessary standard positions of life. 



VI 
THE SLEEPLESS BOGEY 

I had always been profoundly impressed, 
when I lay awake in the night, with how im- 
portant it was for me not to. 

I had come to have, in common with sev- 
eral million other people, what I can only 
call as I look back on it now, a desperate 
and unbridled feeling about sleep and about 
lying awake in the night. 

The first night after I had got the knack 
of lying down and had begun lying still, and 
doing my balance in lying as well as I could 
do it in sitting, I lay awake in sheer astonish- 
ment and delight. I looked the Sleep Bogey 
straight in the eye and dropped him forever. 
At first — for the first few nights after I got 
out from under my wild uncontrolled con- 
scientiousness about lying awake — I lay 
awake almost on purpose for the novelty, 
freedom and fling of the thing. 

I did not keep it up, but I lie awake now 
any time I like. 

Being careful to stop sleeping at times is as 
important as to stop eating. 

The idea that sleep is necessarily the most 
128 



The Sleepless Bogey 129 

healthful and restful exercise a man can take, 
appears to be a mistake. Sleeping may be, 
and often is, a disease in itself. 

A heavy stupor or collapsed sleep in the 
middle of the day after eating, should often 
be stopped, and the cause of the sleep — prob- 
ably the over-relaxed tension of the abdomi- 
nal organs resulting in autointoxication and 
poisoning — should be removed. 

Instead of going to sleep and relaxing and 
reducing still more, the necessary tension of 
the intestine, one should quietly take the 
proper exercise or the proper position, until 
the abdominal organs recover enough ten- 
sion, to master their contents instead of being 
mastered by them. Then the sleep one has 
been yielding to as being healthful — like any 
other disease — passes away. 

Being abnormally asleep is as bad as being 
abnormally awake. 

If a man has a habit of dangerous and 
poisoned sleep from four in the morning on, 
he will find that waking himself up and wak- 
ing the intestine up — even getting up at four 
and taking a walk — would tire him less than 
staying in his warm and proper bed, lying 
and struggling, and when the gases of im- 
perfect combustion have pushed back even 
the stupendous muscle of the diaphragm it- 



J 30 Invisible 'Exercise, 

self, trying to push It down like the lid on a 
boiler head, by holding it in a little longer 
and a little further with breath! 

Instead of holding down the lid with a 
breath, a man should wake up, should use 
his whole backbone to wake up his body 
[enough to make it fit to sleep. This is man- 
aged best by seeing to it that one's mind is 
fully awake and then taking and keeping a 
position without necessarily leaving one's bed, 
which makes the backbone do its own natural 
mechanical work — putting the muscles and 
nerves concerned in place and automatically 
tensing the abdomen. 

Then a man, having seen to it at last that 
his immortal soul is no longer an appendage 
or a sub-head under an Alimentary Canal, 
falls asleep. 

Of course what one is really occupied in 
'doing, in changing a habit of one's body, is 
changing a habit of one's mind. One is en- 
gaged in breaking through for one's self a 
new brain track toward the body. 

The last stronghold of the subconscious 
which the new control has to take in a man 
is his eight hours of sleep. 

The new control begins by inhibiting 
slowly the kind of sleep, that is, the kind of 
lying down, one has had before. 



The Sleepless Bogey 131 

One has to begin by carrying the practice 
of balancing one has tried in standing, sitting 
and walking, all day, into bed and into the 
night. 

After one has got along to a certain stage, 
one finds one's self lying awake in one's new 
control which one has learned. Before one 
knows it, one comes on the fact that lying 
wide awake in bed with one's new and more 
perfect control, rests one so much more than 
mere sleeping ever did, that in going off into 
the old complete unconsciousness one feels 
one is almost missing something ! When one 
does drop into sleep at last, it is a new sleep. 
One modulates slowly out of the new lying 
awake, into the new lying asleep, and one 
sleeps as much in four hours as one did be- 
fore in eight. 



VII 
THE FEELING TIRED FAKE 

There are certain ideas which seem to be 
in good and regular standing and which most 
well men today seem to think they must have, 
which I do not feel that they or I should 
propose any longer — in a world as well- 
conceived as this — to be put off with. 

The first idea is "killing time" — the idea 
that we must all expect mean sheepish be- 
tween-times in our lives — vague purgatories 
in which we are supposed to wait in a kind of 
dull ache for something to be got over or 
for something to happen. 

Killing time is as much a crime as killing 
anything, and is merely a less dignified kind 
of murder in which a man in a slow foolish 
and rather skulking way is killing himself. 

The second idea, which is a close second to 
"killing time" is a homeopathic weak, safer- 
looking substitute for killing time — a kind of 
darn for it — called being tired. 

Being tired, as originally planned by an 
efficient Creator, is a flawless thing, without 
discomfort, a deep, happy and as in children, 
a delicious thing. 

132 



The Feeling Tired Fake 133 

When people say they are tired, if they are 
not enjoying it, they are not using correct 
English. They should say they are sick — 
that they are exhausted. 

Being tired is meant to be a thing one looks 
forward to for itself, as one looks forward 
to one's meals, or as one looks forward to 
the feeling that follows a bath. 

Being tired that goes past the point where 
one is enjoying it and enjoying everything 
about it — the way a drowsy child does — is, 
from the point of view of a highly organized 
man, a crude, gauche, uncoordinated proceed- 
ing for a real gentleman to be caught in. 
From the point of view of even quite plain 
simple people like Adam and Eve, or of any 
animal in good and regular standing in the 
Ark, being tired without enjoying it is, to tell 
the plain brute truth, a disreputable experi- 
ence. 

But the third and worst of these conven- 
tional ideas is second-rate sleep — the idea 
that a man of fifty cannot sleep as efficiently 
as a child — the idea millions of big strong 
serious men today seem to be willing to put 
up with, that deep deliciousness or luxury 
in sleep is a thing they are not supposed by 
a decently efficient Creator to have all of 
them, every night, all their lives — the idea 



134 Invisible Exercise 

that sleep, deep penetrating and wonderful 
sleep, bathing every man, soul and body in 
infinity and swinging him back to the stars, 
is something that should be tucked off into a 
little strip of childhood or that one is sup- 
posed to get a chance at on Sunday mornings. 

I cannot prove it, of course, but what I be- 
lieve is this. 

If for the next seven days the people of 
this world would sleep deliciously — would 
sleep fast and deep — would sleep up to the 
tops of their souls and down to their toes, 
they would get as much sleep done in an hour 
as they do now in a night. We would all 
see a new world in a week, a hundred thou- 
sand cities would wake like little children in 
the morning, nations would look in each 
other's faces. Great peoples would find 
themselves gazing at one another from the 
peak of Time with a strange surprise in their 
eyes. "Is that you?" Nations would say. 
"Where have we been?" a hundred million 
people will say to another hundred million 
people, "Why did we not know that this is 
what you were like?" 

If Ireland could sleep for a week — wake 
up with a clear head in the morning saying 
what she wants — what is there she could not 
have? 



The Feeling Tired Fake 135 

The main reason that the average busy 
man in our civilization living under artificial 
conditions does not quit his three supersti- 
tions — the idea that he must expect to kill 
time, and must expect to put up, as a matter 
of course, with a second-class way of being 
tired, and with second-rate sleep, is that he 
allows the machines he lives with to make 
him mechanical-minded toward his physical 
life. He does not stop to think what he 
wants or what the intelligent means are, that 
a man who is running a race with machines 
can use for taking hold of himself, for know- 
ing what the meat and bones in him are about 
and for getting the attention of a body. 



PART TWO 

Advertising One's Self to One's Self 

I. Getting the Attention of a Body. 
II. Four Drills. 

III. Getting the Attention of a Mind. 

IV. Going Forward to Nature. 
V. Looking Up the Open Road. 



I 

GETTING THE ATTENTION OF A BODY 



THE BODY AS A MACHINE 

WHERE TO TAKE HOLD FIRST TO GET ITS 

ATTENTION 

HIGHLY-EDUCATED horses are not 
incapable of standing around on two 
legs. 

Most of us have seen them doing it — po- 
litely and thoughtfully — on tubs, in circuses. 

They can do it quite a little while, fairly 
well, but when they try to keep it up they find 
that their knees have been put on the wrong 
way, and that as their muscles and nerves are 
arranged apparently to hang from their 
spines instead of their abdomens, it is a tire- 
some strain on their stomachs. 

Whatever else it is or is not, a living body 
is a machine. A horse is a horse machine and 
a man is a man machine, and mechanical laws 
have first to be considered. 

The body of a horse would have to have 
all its muscles rehung and its whole nervous 
system rewired, to stand erect, and an erect 
man would have to be arranged all over, to 
go about on all fours. If a man is operating 
a machine which is built to operate in one 
141 



142 Invisible Exercise 

way and which will hurt him if he operates 
it in another; and if health consists in taking 
natural and right positions, what is the main 
principle, or the common principle, that runs 
apparently through all these right positions 
for a man? 

The monkey and the man have the same 
general build, and the main difference be- 
tween them is that for thousands of years the 
monkey, living a life in which he has to keep 
ready to spring, has bent his head and 
crouched more and more from age to age to 
get what he wanted, and that man, to get 
what he wanted from age to age, has stood 
more and more erect. 

As it strains a monkey today to stand up 
straight, stretch his back, push in his stomach 
and hold up his head and do what a man 
does, it strains a man to do what a monkey 
does. 

There is something about crouching that 
strains a man when he does it, and there is 
something when a man is letting himself 
strain, which makes him crouch. 

It apparently works both ways. 

In a day like ours in which men and women 
are not only competing with one another, but 
running every day for dear life, a race with 
machines, what civilization is suffering from 



Where to Take Hold 143 

to the breaking point, is strain, and people 
are crouching to live. 

The fact that most people we know — the 
strained people all about us — are not crouch- 
ing perceptibly, have not taken more than an 
eighth of an inch off their spines as yet, is 
irrelevant. Taken as it always is off the 
upper end, the brain end, or determining end, 
an eighth of an inch taken off a man's spine 
is enough to throw away practically a third 
or a half of the good of the rest of it. 

It is this last eighth of an inch — the erect- 
ness of the human spirit, the pride, the 
haughtiness, the quietness, the ease, the in- 
souciance of his body — which has made man 
what he is. Man towers above all the ani- 
mals because he keeps towering above him- 
self. While he obviously has more faults 
than the animals and is always going about, 
like no one else in creation, sinning sins 
right and left, it Is because he has a super- 
self ideal, lives with a dally lurking con- 
sciousness of something above and beyond, 
which keeps him fighting to be superior to 
himself, that he is what he is. 

What a strained civilization does Is to play 
havoc in man with his last eighth of an inch. 

When the average man in the average 
mood today makes a little extra effort, he in- 



144 Invisible Exercise 

sensibly bends or crouches to make it. The 
thing he sees baldly in the old man — the old 
man's tendency to bend — is a thing he is prac- 
ticing, unless he looks out, nearly all the time 
himself. In the same way that a small boy 
with his first pen eagerly learning to write 
twists his tongue, the grown man when he 
makes a special effort of any kind, crouches 
both in mind and body to do it — like a cat 
about to spring. 

He soon gets this habit and in old age he 
merely ossifies or statueizes it. 

When the small boy is learning to write 
the first thing he does is to put his effort into 
the first inch of his fingers. Then into the 
whole fingers. Then into the hand. Then 
into the fore-arm. Then into the whole arm. 
Finally, if he grows up and ever learns to 
write at all and expresses himself in his hand- 
writing, Re writes with his whole back, and 
people feel the whole man behind every word. 

When the boy is slaving away trying to 
put the whole supreme effort into the first 
inch of his fingers, some indefinable primeval 
instinct in him, makes him stick out his tongue 
and work his mouth. The fingers are trying 
to do, of course, what a whole back, backed 
up by a whole boy ought to do, and naturally 
the boy's tongue (representing nobly all his 



Where, to Take Hold 145 

small insldes) In sheer sympathy, joins in the 
struggle. 

This tendency the boy has, to entirely over- 
look the long reach and sweep of his back, 
cramp his fingers, screw up his mouth, brace 
his stomach, stick out his tongue and curl up 
his toes to write, makes him tired and old at 
forty. He curls up his toes because he is 
curling up his spine, shortening his body, and 
crouching to work his fingers. He gets over, 
of course, sticking out his tongue and curling 
up his toes to make an effort, but the curling 
up his spine to try — the crouching to succeed 
follows him. 

Then everything follows. Competition and 
civilization see to it that it is necessary to 
try. The only way he knows to try is to 
crouch. 

Then The Tired Business Man, The 
Twenty-Nine, Specialists, Purgatories, and 
Sanatarlums and Muldoons. 

T. B. M. Theaters. T. B. M. Books. 
T. B. M. Movies. T. B. M. Country. 

The small boy who sticks out his tongue, 
who grows up, gets dignified, holds his tongue 
in and cramps his back, is what is the matter 
with civilization. Thousands of people who 
are crouching their backs, are trying to save 
the world from other people who are crouch- 



146 Invisible Exercise 

ing their backs, and are crouching their backs 
to do it. 

Crouching is Bolshevik. 

One almost comes to feel that people who 
are trying to save the world with their nerves 
instead of their backbones deserve the world 
they have. 



If one were to imagine a machine which 
has the power of pinching its own wheels — 
doing it very slightly, of course, so that they 
still go, but go hard — one would be imagining 
something very like the human body. 

The body is a machine with a mind at- 
tached or, in many persons, semi-attached. 

This mind connected with the machine has 
the power by its own moodiness of shortening 
the pistons, of slacking the leather belting, 
of twisting and subtly mislaying the organs 
and of disturbing the electric wiring, and of 
making the wheels in the machine, at any 
time the mind takes a notion, less round than 
they ought to be, so that the machine runs 
hard, and takes a third more gas to run. 

If people allow their minds to shrink and 
warp their bodies and are practically only 
alive enough to go to bed at noon, because 
their vital organs are out of true and running 



Where to Take Hold 147 

with friction, what can they do to stop it, be 
ahve in an afternoon or possibly even an 
evening? 

They can look up the facts about them- 
selves in a clear-cut and simple way. The 
position of mechanical advantage for the 
organs of the body is an easily ascertainable 
definite fact and when ascertained can be 
acted on definitely at once. 

There is something very substantial and 
satisfying about reducing health to its lowest 
terms, about understanding the body and 
dealing with the body as a machine. One 
avoids psychic folderol. One knows that one 
knows that the body — whatever else it is or 
is not — is at least a machine. 



IN AND UP 

There are two fundamental principles In 
the human body as a machine. One of those 
is Pinch and the other is Pull. 

This chapter is about the first. 

The simplest and most rudimentary prin- 
ciple of power in biology seems to be squeez- 
ing. 

The oyster gets the power for its simple 
digestive apparatus in this way. 

The first tentative idea Nature seems to 
have had in a living body, is to put the vital 
organs together in an elastic sac. Then to 
pinch them together into a position of me- 
chanical advantage, until they do their work. 

What is the matter with the average baby 
when he is having a stomach ache, is that 
the little button the dear child is supplied 
with, is not buttoned up tight enough. His 
elastic around the middle which is supposed 
to squeeze his food together, get the good 
out of it and press its chemicals into his 
blood, is stretched to a point where it is not 
at a mechanical advantage. The pull in the 
148 



In and Up I49 

baby's elastic is only good up to a certain 
point. Then it comparatively goes dead and 
pulls faintly. So he yowls. 

When he grows up, though his art form 
for expressing what is happening to him 
changes, what happens is not far different. 

The abdominal cavity may be practically 
regarded as a rubber bag — a small retort 
furnished with an automatic living leather 
spring which keeps it pulled together just the 
right size to do its work. Its work consists 
in holding together, pressing and burning out 
vital fluids from food and distributing them 
to the body. 

If for any reason this resilient, self-pulled- 
together rubber bag stops pulling itself to- 
gether enough and the bag becomes distended 
and the contents become so loosely placed 
they can not quite burn freely, gas is formed 
from the imperfect combustion and causes 
still more distention. More distention causes 
still more Imperfect combustion, a vicious 
circle is set up and a man soon finds himself 
the victim — however unconscious he at first 
may be — of chronic Indigestion. 

What a man who has chronic indigestion 
has, is what might be called a sprung- 
stomach. He is trying to do what has to be 
done, with a spring that has been stretched 



150 Invisible Exercise, 

until it has lost its power to spring. He is 
going about all the while, trying to hold him- 
self together in perfect seriousness, with a 
kind of human dead elastic. 

The majority of the good plodding people 
one sees about, who would scout the idea of 
being ill, but who are always going about 
their duties without due surplus or enthus- 
iasm, if they would take three inches off their 
measure in front just below the hips, and put 
the three inches around on their lower ribs 
at the back, would scarcely know themselves 
in six months, and certainly would not be 
known by their friends or by their employers. 

One thing to do is to stop eating or to 
eat very little so that imperfect combustion 
and less poisonous gas will be produced by 
the sprung stomach. Another is to take 
drugs and neutralize the poison the sprung- 
stomach will produce. Another is to take 
squirming exercises and directly and violently 
exercise the stomach-spring and make it 
spring in by main strength even where it 
doesn't belong. The other is to stop the 
cause — stop the sprung - stomach's being 
sprung — lift the weakened stomach-spring 
up, put it where it belongs and where its 
spring has a chance to work. 

There are vjery few men whose backs sup- 



In and Up 151 

port their stomachs as they should. Entirely 
irrespective of being consciously ill or well, 
or of being lean or fat, if a man goes too far 
in letting his stomach curve out, it is because 
he is going too far in letting his back curve 
in. The way for a man to reduce the noble 
outer curve in front, is to take up the slack 
in his back. There are very few stomachs 
that are not trying to do their work in a lower 
position and a larger size than they can do 
it, and that are not steadily and increasingly 
weakening the spring, in this way. 

The original good intention of the straight- 
front corset, of giving a stream-line inward 
to the body, if really carried out by a man 
himself, man-fashion, by using his own back- 
bone, by using the one great natural main- 
spring of the body, and the natural stays or 
small springs ranged along on it for the ex- 
press purpose of snapping a whole man's 
whole being into place, and of pinching his 
stomach — of taking firm hold of the poor 
old lackadaisical familiar formlessness he 
lets hang in front of him, and keeping it 
buttoned up tight enough to work — would 
make a new man out of anybody. 

The idea which I have tried to express in 
this chapter has been summed up and ex- 
pressed a great deal better, perhaps, by a 



152 Invisible Exercise 

classic poet in a crooked little rhyme we were 
all brought up on (very much crookeder) : 

Hi duddle duddle! 

The Duck in the puddle 

The Cow jumped over the quack 

The little boy laughed to see such sport 

— ^To see such a terrible knack. 

Like a bowlful of jilly 

His tummy went silly 

And his belly ran away with his back ! 

In other words the moral of this chapter 
(which might have been called ^'Pinching In 
In Front") is Pulling Up Behind. 

The question is — how to do it. 



m 

UP AND IN 

When the question was put two thousand 
years ago in a sermon "What man can by 
taking thought, add a cubit to his stature?" 
if a certain man I know, who has a very short 
but hopeful body and a very long head, had 
been there, he would probably have stayed 
afterwards a little, watched his chance for a 
quiet word, and would have said that while 
he was not sure about a cubit, or sure just 
how much adding a cubit by taking thought 
would come to, he was sure that by taking 
thought, he could do an inch. 

Everybody does half an inch every night 
without thinking at all, and there are very 
few people who after a little practice could 
not manage three-eighths of an inch by tak- 
ing thought, and by taking still more thought 
over a period of months, they could most 
of them manage quite a little more. 

As a man, any minute he likes as he walks, 
is able to take a longer step, he should be able 
any minute he likes to take a longer back. 

It is but left to consider just what taking a 
153 



154 Invisible Exercise 

longer back is, and just where one should 
look among the common experiences of life 
for one's idea of how to do it. 

If by lying flat in bed and stretching them- 
selves eight hours, people in general, already 
are getting up half an inch taller in the morn- 
ing, it would seem to be reasonable to start 
out with the idea that any setting-up exercise 
a man may plan for stretching the lever he 
lives with, all day, should be modeled on 
what happens to him in bed. It would seem 
to be obvious that this night-arrangement for 
getting the position of mechanical advantage 
must be sound, and that the best possible 
setting-up exercise any man could hope to 
work out for himself for daylight use, would 
be a daylight imitation of it or at least of 
the main idea in it. 

The imitation does not need to be literal. 

What one wants is a daylight imitation, not 
of lying down, but of the result of lying 
down — something more salubrious than go- 
ing to bed in a conversation would be — some- 
thing convenient and quick — something, in 
fact, like the exercise in this book, by which 
a man can subtly rearrange or readjust at 
will the contents of his being, hang them all 
up where they belong in a minute instead of 
taking all night. 



up and In 155 

The all-night arrangement for getting the 
position of mechanical advantage is, of 
course, the pleasant one, and the one on 
which one would regularly rely, but if one is 
interrupted or behind in one's sleep-schedule 
and still has to go to the office and proposes 
to have some little setting-up device — some 
kind of cocktail of motion, by which in a few 
seconds, in any position one happened to be, 
one could promptly hang one's whole being 
up on its peg, make one's self feel any time 
of day as if one had just got up in the morn- 
ing — say for the next thirty minutes, what 
would it be like? 

If there is such a setting-up exercise as this 
for a man, all ready and waiting for him, 
perhaps my reader will forgive me for be- 
lieving as I do in this book, wild horses could 
not drag a man away from learning it and 
from putting it forward as the first thing in 
his life. 

There are two main principles upon which 
such a setting-up exercise for imitating on a 
small scale what happens in a night should 
be based. 

First. — ^A man's back should be up. Even 
if it costs effort, the back should be up. 

Second. — The less effort there is, the bet- 
ter it comes up and the longer it stays. 



156 Invisible Exercise 

Looking at the body as a biological ma- 
chine there are two main principles on which 
it works. It has two springs. Living con- 
sists in keeping them wound up. One spring 
is the spring that springs in, which belongs 
in the abdomen and the other is the great 
central mainspring, which springs out or 
springs up and which is located in the back. 

The first thing to be remembered in any 
sound setting-up exercise a man may plan is 
that the back is a spring and that it wants 
to come up. 



IV 

HOW TO TAKE A LONGER BACK 

Everyone knows how to do it, has done it 
thousands of times in his Ufe. There is noth- 
ing complicated or difficult about doing it. 
Thousands of people are going to do it or 
have already done it in one way or the other 
may times while reading this book. 

Anybody who can yawn, or who knows his 
own yawn, when he is having one, can do it. 

One knows when one is yawning and 
stretching, one does not really stretch one's 
self. One lets one's self stretch. When a 
man stands up, shakes himself, rearranges 
himself and yawns after a long sitting, opens 
his mouth, opens up and spreads out his 
arms, and opens up and spreads out his 
upper back, he does not strictly pull his back 
up. He feels it is being done and yields to 
it. He frees the spring he was made with, 
and the spring goes up. 

A man finds he is naturally refreshed by 
not having to hold the spring down any 
longer, and being released from the strain, 
he begins at once, now that he thinks of it, 
letting himself at last be as tall as he likes. 

157 



158 Invisible Exercise 

All exercise by a man in a normal state 
should be conceived as following up the es- 
sential spirit and method of the yawn — as 
an equilibrium between tension and relaxa- 
tion, luxurious, effortless, and full at one 
and the same time, like the yawn, of pleasur- 
able excitement and rest. 

This principle of letting one's self out, of 
precise equilibrium between motion and rest, 
applies equally to walking, sitting and lying 
down — to all of the three positions of life 
in proportion as they are perfected. 

The idea of walking is the yawning idea 
carried further, a letting out along a road of 
the stretch in the legs and the latent stretch 
in the back. The yawn proper is a mere 
opening formality. What one does in walk- 
ing is to carry the idea — the real thought in 
a yawn — out. When normal men living as 
men do today in a held-in civilization, take 
a walk, what they are doing is not taking ex- 
ercise, pushing their bodies around or making 
their bodies work. They are letting their 
bodies out. What it is one really likes about 
starting out on a hike is that — civilization 
or no civilization — one is letting one's spring 
at last, let go. One is letting one's back — 
the held-down main-spring of being — slip up 
Into place. 



How to Take a Longer Back 159 

When a man takes what Is called rather 
inaccurately a setting-up exercise, he may 
have a set-up feeling at the end of it, but he 
should not feel so set up over it. He did 
not do it. A spring is a spring. The way 
one works it, is to release it. The command- 
ing thing to do is to release it. This power 
to give quietly the command for the release 
in one's body is what is called coordination 
or health. 

Whatever else a man's exercise for keep- 
ing fit may be, it should be some form of 
movement which will be conceived and carried 
out, not as an effort or as work, but like all 
the natural appetites — like talking, like laugh- 
ing, like eating, like sex, like breathing, yawn- 
ing and stretching — as relief. 

What a man finally comes to in the whole 
matter of exercise, if he pursues and finds 
the position of mechanical advantage and 
lives with it from day to day, is not merely a 
new point of view about exercise itself, but 
a whole new outlook on life. 

There is a sense in which the very word 
setting-up exercise, in our modern civilization, 
is what is the matter with us and should be 
dropped out of our vocabularies and our 
thoughts. 



i6o Invisible Exercise 

Taking a setting-up exercise is better than 
nothing, but it is a mistake. 

One should take a letting-up exercise. One 
should stop preventing the back from coming 
up when it wants to. One should let one's 
self up. 

Invisible Exercise is an exercise in not do- 
ing something, a drill in not holding the back 
down. 

Let every man have a sign up over his 
desk. 



STOP. PREVENTING YOUR BACK FROM 

COMING up! 

LET YOURSELF UP ! 



From the point of view of equilibrium and 
perfected strength and control, setting one's 
self up — yanking the back up commandingly 
where it belongs — is weak. The main thing 
one wants an exercise for, is the power to do 
the opposite — the power to let up, to free 
one's back from the subtle unconscious cramp 
or strain that goes with one's concentrated 
mind for the day. Then the back, like any 
other spring that has been waiting to let go, 
goes up of itself. 



BEING AS TALL AS ONE LIKES 

The way a group of men who have just 
risen from a dinner together, will almost as 
a matter of course avoid taking the easy 
chairs, or probably any chairs at all and will 
walk to the window or the fire, stretch their 
backs, unconsciously heighten themselves and 
spread their legs, is one of scores of little 
things men do without knowing, which reveal 
the naturalness of the impulse I propose 
people should make the most of and follow 
up. It is natural to everybody— the instinct 
to balance or rather rebalance after eating 
— hang the new dinner up on the backbone 
— put it where it belongs to digest it. 

To take the spirit and the technique of what 
the group of men standing after dinner are 
unconsciously doing to themselves, and carry 
it further into a specific exercise or drill any 
man can use, when he finds he is running over 
the line in his work, or at his desk, and needs 
to recover the position of mechanical ad- 
vantage, is what all exercise should be con- 
ceived to do. 

i6i 



1 62 Invisible Exercise 

When one has been giving orders to one's 
body in this way awhile one soon begins notic- 
ing how popular in Nature and in the world 
about one these orders seem to be, and how 
natural and instinctive they are. 

The rooster when he crows, puts his head 
forward and up to widen and heighten his 
back, and says "ah!" 

The baby in his crib lying on his back 
kicking his legs, and cooing, and looking at 
his pink toes in the air is taking essentially 
the same exercise in a lie-down position, re- 
ducing the curve in his back, and playing up 
his feet. 

The horse — the more spirited type of 
horse — in the act of giving the extra arch to 
his neck, is doing the same thing, reducing 
the sag or curve in his spine, by relaxing his 
neck and then putting his head forward and 
up. 

It comes upon one in many ways, one is 
adding to one's stature. 

One knows It from the sense of being on 
top of one's self and of doing everything 
from above. One knows It partly from mir- 
rors that seem to grow low and from look- 
ing into the faces of old friends. 

Another thing one knows it by, is that on'ei 
;enjoys digesting a dinner instead of merely 



Being as Tall as One Likes 163 

enjoying eating it One is keen for one's 
work right after luncheon because one's 
whole body is having a lark with the luncheon. 
And one sits up late with scorn. One gets 
up early for breakfast with joy. 

All sorts of queer things happen when a 
man, day after day, is letting himself be as 
tall as he likes. 

But best of all, perhaps, is the conscious 
and immediate sense of power, the sense all 
day that all the factors of health are in one's 
own hands and under the control of one mo- 
tion of one's own mind and body. 

It is a serene matter-of-fact orderly idea, 
taking the position of mechanical advantage. 
One does not need to keep looking one's self 
up in an encyclopedia or on page 769 in a 
Diet Book or to be sure to consult just the 
right psycho-analyst for one's complexes for 
the day. One can believe in and come to 
understand, perhaps, all these grave wise- 
sounding depths of knowledge, but one can 
take one's time for It, and in the meantime, 
with one's own backbone located conveniently 
not an inch away — the very spigot of being 
— one turns one's health on at will. 



VI 

SUMMARY 

I have expressed, in this book in the form 
of the story of how I came to see and beheve 
them, the main principles of my conception 
of the human body as a machine. 

I would like, before giving the drill, to 
sum these principles up and place them to- 
gether in their order as one comes out of the 
other. 

First. — ^The human body looked at simply 
and clearly and reduced to its lowest terms 
is a machine. 

Second. — It is a machine so delicately con- 
structed and constructed of such materials 
that the man who lives with it can pinch its 
wheels. 

The mind connected with the machine has 
the power by its own moodiness, of shorten- 
ing the pistons, of overheating or warping the 
wheels in the machine and at any time it takes 
a notion, making the wheels less round than 
they ought to be so that the machine runs 
hard and takes a third more gas to run. 

Third. — If the man that lives in the ma- 
164 



Summary 165 

chine keeps from letting his mind overheat 
it or warp It, the machine turns out for him 
his utmost volume of vitality. If he lets his 
mind overheat or warp the wheels and then 
expects the wheels he is keeping from being 
round, to run smoothly, he must expect 
trouble soon. He finds that his vitality in- 
stead of being turned on for him is being 
turned off for him before his own eyes, by 
the very machine that was created to produce 
it. 

Fourth. — The first thing a man, therefore, 
has to look out for in the matter of health 
control, is to see to it that his mind under- 
stands just what kind of a machine it is being 
allowed to live with, and just where it likes 
to be taken hold of and have its attention 
got, if it is to work naturally and easily — 
that is, if it is to work in what is known among 
machines as the position of mechanical ad- 
vantage. 

Fifth. — The back is the place for the mind 
to take hold of, to get all at once the atten- 
tion of the whole body and to give every 
organ in the body its position of mechanical 
advantage. 

Sixth. — ^The more of its full length a man 
can be persuaded, in spite of civilization and 
chairs, to allow his back to have, the more 



1 66 Invisible Exercise 

coordinated or super-coordinated he can be- 
come and the more invisibly and frictionlessly 
his machine will run. 

Seventh. — ^The back is a natural spring 
and wants to be long and the main thing a 
man has to learn to do is to stop his mind 
in time and keep it from cramping and strain- 
ing his neck so that his back can get up 
where it wants to. 

Eighth. — The way for a man to control his 
vitality and to live all the while with the 
organs of his body in the habitual positon 
of power and mechanical advantage, is to 
learn to make his mind give specific orders to 
the neck to relax, — get itself out of the way 
— so that the head can go forward and up 
and the back spring back into place. 

Ninth. — ^The way to learn to give these 
orders is to train one's mind in inhibition, in 
the power to stop giving the old and wrong 
orders and then give the right ones. 

Tenth. — One should take a specific order- 
drill to do this — a conscious setting-up ex- 
ercise for one's mind in learning to giv:e or- 
*ders to the body. One should drill one's 
mind in the power to stop giving the wrong 
orders and to substitute the right ones until 
one has done them so often and likes them 
so much that they become a habit. 



Summary 1 67 

If the reader wants a little bird^s-eye view 
of what is supposed to have happened to him 
so far in this book he will find it in th:ese ten 
points. 



II 

FOUR DRILLS 



I 

INTRODUCING THE DRILLS 

THE average busy man who wants to 
learn to hit off his own balance or line 
of least resistance, and have it to live with 
every day, would like to arrange if he could, 
a program something like this: 

( I ) Take a special drill in which promptly 
and efficiently and once for all, one coaches 
one's self in balancing. 

( 2 ) Pass the balancing in the drill on into 
balancing in everything. 

(3) Drop the drill as a drill altogether. 

The object of this preliminary or tempo- 
rary drill should be to bring out and accentu- 
ate in a man's mind the essential spiritual 
and mechanical principle that underlies and 
makes effective any and all exercise, if only 
the exercise of sitting up in a chair or lying 
down In a bed. Any exercise a man may 
choose or have occasion to take, from golf 
and medicine ball and calisthenics to walking 
upstairs, should be conceived while It Is being 
taken on the principle of hitting off a bal- 
ance, of finding the line of least resistance. 
171 



172 Invisible Exercise 

The kind of drill that one does not have 
to keep up forever or which is of such a 
nature that it modulates naturally into one's 
daily life so that without taking any time 
off and without knowing it, one is practically 
drilling all the time, would seem to be; the 
best. 

In the pages that follow I am bringing 
forward a few directions for the particular 
form of setting-up exercise I have used in 
coaching myself and in hitting off my own 
balance. In one modified form or another 
it's main principle may prove useful to others. 

But every man, of course, must be his own 
coach. 

The art of finding one's own control, of 
freeing the neck and learning to balance one's 
body on itself as one learns to balance it on 
a bicycle, is obviously an intimate and per- 
sonal achievement. No one in a book like 
this or otherwise, can teach another man's 
self-control for him any more than he can 
keep his balance on his bicycle for him. 



The reader will notice that the great main 
principle that runs through each of the fol- 
lowing drills Is the heaping up of the power 
of inhibition in it — the main practical means 



Summary 173 

of all self-control. One has to keep saying 
No in it with each motion one orders from 
the body, to keep the body effortless and keep 
it along the line of least resistance. And, 
yet, with all its effortlessness the physical or 
mechanical change in the body and in the 
position of the organs of the body is very 
great. 



At first until the habit of giving the funda- 
mental orders in Invisible Exercise was es- 
tablished and perfected I took the exercises 
that follow, twenty minutes at a time — pos- 
sibly an hour in all during a day — and in the 
rudimentary and visible form which follows, 
but I practice the ideas in the drills now and 
get my results with them now, in two minutes 
— ^practice them invisibly and without any- 
one's knowing it, and in any position, sitting, 
walking, standing or lying down, and with- 
out interrupting work. One practices any 
time one happens to think of it — in a street 
car or walking in the street, or waiting for 
a train, or sitting at one's desk — any time 
one has the impulse or the thought, one 
yields to it naturally and gratefully, as one 
would to a yawn or a smoke. 

After one's first success in one's drills in 



174 Invisible Exercise 

conscious control, there is a stage in which 
one finds one's self liking to take them in 
short bits of time many times a day. Then 
a few. Finally, one begins taking them as a 
position, a balance of tension. They become 
subconscious and one is taking them without 
knowing it, all the while, even in one's sleep. 



n 

THE LIE-DOWN DRILL 

Before one has learned to make one's In- 
visible Exercise invisible, one takes the exer- 
cise quite visibly and begins with the I.ie- 
Down exercise, the directions for which I 
give in this chapter. The others — sitting 
down, standing and walking follow. 

The Lie-Down Drill 

Take two newspapers for a mattress and 
spread them on the floor. 

Take two books for a pillow and put them 
under your head. 

Lie flat on your back full length with the 
undersides of your knees resting (as nearly 
as possible) against the floor. 

Notice as you lie in this supposedly flat 
position of your body, the little low arch your 
lower back makes above the floor. See if 
you feel the floor at all at any point with 
your lower back and at what points and 
about how far apart. See if you can get your 
whole hand underneath this curve. See if — 

175 



176 Invisible Tlxercise 

right next to it — you can get two. Then you 
know how long your curve is. 

See how high it is. See if it is half an 
inch high by putting one finger in under. 
Then two if you can, one on top of the other. 
Have a friend try putting his fingers in as he 
can do it at better advantage. 

Object of the lie-down drill — a few min- 
utes a day every day, which you are about to 
take — is to reduce this low arch, this quite 
useless and rather dangerous fancy bridge 
your back makes above the floor. 

Having once put it into your mind that 
what your exercise is for is to reduce this 
curve in your back to what it ought to be so 
that you can make your back longer and 
wider, take the exercise without bothering 
about your back any more. The reduction of 
the curve will come in due time slowly, inevit- 
ably, automatically and by a mechanical proc- 
ess of itself, if you take the exercise. Ex- 
cept in young people the actual change in the 
height of the bridge will be slight, of course, 
but the change in the man himself in due time 
— in the way he pulls his body together in 
front and pulls it up behind — in the way he 
holds himself, carries himself and in the way 
he feels will be great. 

Having determined the object of your 



The Lie-Down Drill 177 

orders you go on to your orders. You say 
these orders over at first slowly, without do- 
ing anything about them. What you are 
supposed to be doing in saying them, is to 
commit them to memory, know what you 
mean by them, and aim your mind with them. 

When I Am Ready I Relax My Neck in 
Order to Let My Head Go Up and in 
Order to Let My Back Widen and 
Lengthen. 

Having said this as you lie on the floor with 
your head on the pillow of books, roll your 
head with as great lightness as possible from 
right to left and from left to right on the 
books. Before you begin ordering yourself 
to relax your neck, you want to be sure you 
know what relaxing a neck is like. You want 
to know when you are thinking it is being 
relaxed, if it is really being relaxed. To 
make sure of this, after rolling your head 
yourself, have a friend take your head in his 
hands and lift it off the books for you (some 
friend you trust who won't try to be funny 
and take advantage of you), resign your head 
to your friend as if it were not your head at 
all, and let him turn it up and turn it down 
and from side to side — let him even give 
your head a gentle little toss, now in one way 



178 Invisible Exercise 

and now in another, catching the head as it 
falls — until the neck you hold it with be- 
comes a genuine honest relaxed neck. 

If he keeps holding it and keeps moving 
it in a way which you cannot possibly guess, 
and therefore a way in which you cannot pos- 
sibly stiffen up and help him, there is soon 
nothing left you can make out to do, except 
to give up helping him and let him place your 
head for you. As there is no way in which 
you can fool your friend about its being re- 
laxed when it is not, you really relax it. 
Every time you are trying to fool yourself 
about its being relaxed when it is not, and 
stiffen your neck to help your friend, he 
catches you at it. He knows you know. You 
know he knows. So you soon let him do with 
your head as he will. You relax your neck 
for him to do it until at last you discover 
in your neck itself, what a relaxed neck is, 
and how much better — ^when you really get it 
— you like it than the other kind. You know 
when you get one — at least you know yours 
— and you have something to go by. In 
other words you have a definite working 
base for the ordering exercise you are about 
to take. 

Having this base and knowing when you 
are on it and when you are off, you pass on 



The Lie-Down Drill 179 

from giving yourself orders in the future 
tense. You begin giving orders in the pres- 
ent, begin giving the orders and fiUing the 
orders you give at the same time. You say 
to yourself I Relax My Neck, and then 
in response to your order, you give yourself 
as good an imitation as you can, of the light- 
ness and ease you have just been having in it 
when you were rolling It or it was being rolled 
for you. Then you say your order over 
slowly once more, four times responding to 
it each time, by removing strain from the 
neck during a slight motion. 

The slight motion Is not necessary but it 
seems to help at first. 

I Relax My Neck 
I Relax My Neck 
I Relax My Neck 
I Relax My Neck 
With My Neck Relaxed I Let My Head 

Go Up 

With My Neck Relaxed I Let My Back 

Widen and Lengthen 

One sees to it each time that one stops and 
inhibits, that one takes time to say No before 
one gives each order or makes a motion. 
What the No is for is to remind one — to give 
one a chance to put the ease into one's neck — 
before one gives the order to put the head up. 
Then one passes the ease on into the head 



i8o Invisible Exercise 

before one puts it up» Then one passes the 
ease on into the back and along the back into 
the whole body as one orders the stretching, 
the widening and the lengthening of the 
back.* 

This is the first stage of the lie-down exer- 
cise. You repeat the order as just given four 
times, each time acting on the order with the 
utmost effortlessness, studying out new de- 
grees each time of effortlessness, of friction- 
less motion, ferreting out and using your line 
of least resistance. 

After you have given a group of four 
orders like the above once, wait half a min- 
ute and give it a second time. Then a third 
and a fourth. 

This brings you to the end of your first 
stage of the Lie-Down Drill. 

Then as you still lie on your back you go 
into the second stage. You say to yourself 

* In "letting the head go up" the "up" In this He-down 
position of course is not a vertical up, but a horizontal 
up. If one were standing or sitting the up would mean 
lengthening vertically, but in the horizontal position it 
means a horizontal lengthening of the body by seeing to 
it that the head is out of the way — by letting the head 
rest freely on the books, so that it stops interfering and 
does Its part In letting the body be longer on the floor. 

As you are reducing the curve In the back by letting 
it lie free on the floor and of Its own weight reduce 
itself, you free your head. You let your head as it were 
lie up the books. 



The Lie-Down Drill i8i 

that you are going to use the new ease and 
lightness you feel in your neck and the new 
strength it gives you in your back, to lift your 
right leg from the floor. You start to do it 
and for a flash of a second say: 

I Relax My Neck in Order to Let My 

Head Go Forward and Up. 
In Order to Lengthen and Widen My 

Back. 
In Order to Make My Back Help Me 

Lift My Leg from the Floor. 

With this order going through your mind 
as the definite means of hfting your leg — of 
making your back help you lift it the way any 
baby's would — you begin very slowly moving 
the leg up, starting the motion at the knee, 
studying your line of least resistance with 
your knee relaxed, relaxing your neck and 
lengthening your back and letting your right 
leg be lifted by your back until your foot is 
up — until it is up any pleasant-feeling dis- 
tance — any easy distance you like, from five 
to twenty inches from the floor. 

Then crooking your knee and bringing 
your foot as far toward you as it naturally 
comes (with your leg in a wedge-shaped 
position) let your foot rest on the floor a 
second. 

Then with your knee relaxed and with 



1 82 Invisible Exercise 

your neck still more relaxed and with your 
back still more widening and lengthening, let 
your leg down to full length on the floor 
again.* 

Repeat these motions with each leg four 
times — four orders each time each order 
delayed by a flash of relaxing your neck — 
and you have come to the end of the first 
lie-down exercise. 

The end of the exercise consists in rising 
from flat on your back on the floor to stand- 
ing erect on your feet without helping your- 
self to get up, without as much as putting a 
finger on the floor.t 

*In starting the motion at the knee and in having 
your back do its part you are supposed — ^when you finally 
perfect the exercise — to be letting your knee float up — 
pulled up as it were by the ceiling — a quite new physical 
experience when the pupil gets relaxed and in command 
enough to let it come. Then as your knee comes up of 
itself you draw it slowly toward your head letting the 
foot hang and take care of itself. 

t The reason for ending this exercise in this way is 
that if you sincerely use the nice new little stretch in you 
that comes from the exercise on the floor you will soon 
find in a rather unexpected way that you are able to 
stand up without the help of a finger. 

On the other hand if you try to leave the nice new 
little stretch in you on the floor — if you propose to waste 
it — propose not to take it up with you where you can use 
it to sit with and walk with and stand with — so that 
you get the good of it all day, you will have to put your 
hands on the floor to help you up. 

You will anyway probably at first, but from day to 
day as you take your drill and succeed with your re- 
laxed stretch in unkrinkling the cramp in your neck and 
taking up the tuck in your back, the nearer you feel your- 
self to getting up without touching a finger — the nearer 



The Lie-Down Drill 183 

When you begin trying to do this, you find 
that the best way to stretch yourself to your 
full height standing up, Is to begin It by 
stretching yourself to your full height lying 
(down. 

To this end when you want to get up from 
the floor as a gentleman should or as any real 
lady should, without touching your hands, you 
lie still a second longer on the floor and give 
this order once more to yourself as you He: 

I Relax My Neck in Order to Let the 
Cramp in It Get Out of the Way. 

In Order to Let My Head Go Up. 

In Order to Let My Back Widen and 
Lengthen — In Order to Have My 
Back Take Hold of My Legs and 
Stand Me Up.* 



you will get to using your lie-down stretch to stand up 
with — that is the nearer you will get to standing up as 
easily as you lie down. 

A man who cannot stand stretched as easily and grate- 
fully as he lies down stretched, is not yet a grown-up 
man — cannot be said to be a self-controlled frictionless, 
coordinated man living his life on ball bearings — living 
his life as a well-bred man is supposed to live it, with 
a song or surplus in his blood that comes from having 
every day, a maximum of work, a feather-edge of effort. 

*This getting up from the floor without the help of 
the hands may be regarded as optional. Many pupils 
who are enjoying the best benefits of Invisible Exercise 
fail to get it until long after everything else. The es- 
sential part of The Lie-Down Drill ends at the top of 
page 182. 



ni 

THE SIT-DOWN DRILL 

Before going on to give the orders for 
the Sit-Down Drill, there is one point on 
which it might save time to have an under- 
standing. 

Obviously if one is stopping a wrong un- 
conscious habit one's mind has, of giving an 
order to the body, and substituting a right 
conscious habit of giving the order, one 
wants to begin one's exercise each time by 
making a clearing in one's mind, by seeing to 
it one knows just what it is, one is trying to 
do. 

It is the growing consciousness of just what 
it is one is trying to do, while one is doing it, 
that makes one do it better. 

A little experience I had one day, of my 
own, in the days when I was learning the sit- 
down exercise, may illustrate just what it is 
for. At least — it did for me — and it may 
'for other people. 

These Drill Notes are being written In my 
fish-house study on the rocks by my house on 

184 



The Sit'Down Drill 185 

a Ifttle Island in Maine, twenty miles out to 
sea. I am sitting on three huge pulleys — 
block-pulleys taken from a wreck and my 
typewriter desk, taken from where it has 
tossed on the roof of the ocean many years, 
is a white buoy-keg. 

Last summer before I moved for the sea- 
son to my home In Maine, I sprained my arm 
and my morning's work — my usual amount 
of work on my typewriter — ^was being got 
through from day to day with much difficulty. 

I made up my mind one Wednesday night 
when I went to bed that I would quit at the 
:end of the week and Thursday morning 
(after a night on the boat) I found myself 
sitting on my pulley in Maine with my type- 
writer on my white buoy-keg, sailing away 
with words — sentences floating off the tips of 
my fingers on to the keys — as if my arms 
were not there ! 

My right arm was still a sprained and anx- 
ious arm, but In some mysterious way the 
whole responsibility my arms had felt the day 
before, for that typewriter had disappeared. 

If the learner wants to know the object and 
gain the object quickly of the following slt- 
(down exercise there is no better way to start 
than by seeing, following up and applying the 
significance of this single little experience — 



1 86 Invisible Exercise 

namely; One morning I find myself thump- 
ing out pains and words on a machine and 
thinking I must give up and stop trying to 
run the machine at all and the next morning 
I find myself running the same machine as if 
a wire from the ceiling had been attached to 
me at the top of my back — as if some motor 
I was supposed to be connected up with had 
got hold of me, at least got hold of my arms 
and got hold of my legs and my fingers — 
made a kind of lever of my whole being and 
was running my typewriter for me. 

Of course, all that had happened was that 
by sheer circumstance — by sheer inconve- 
nience — I had been compelled by some 
pulleys and a white buoy-keg to sit in a suit- 
able or strategic position to do my work. 

My balance did my work for me. The 
pulleys I sat on, put me up so high and the 
keg spread my legs so far apart to get them 
around both sides of it, that my whole bal- 
ance was changed and with my typewriter ly- 
ing low before me, I attacked it at a great 
advantage and in a position of power from 
above. 

I have merely stated the fact, so far, of 
what happened to me on the white buoy keg. 

If I were to state the truth about it — the 
significance of the fact — what the fact means 



The SiuDown Drill 187 

to me, It would be this: I do not want to 
carry around with me all my life three pulleys 
and a white buoy-keg to make me sit as I 
should. 

What I want — and this Is what Is being 
brought forward in this next exercise, Is a 
substitute, a conscious unnoticeable convenient 
substitute — some way in which, by giving a 
simple order, any time I like, without turning 
a hair and without anybody's knowing it, I 
can do to myself and do for myself what was 
done to me and done for me one day in 
Maine by three pulleys and a white buoy-keg. 

This is what a civilization — a sitting down 
civilization wants too. 

There are three things In the way of self- 
control, a man does not want. 

As a substitute for these three things I am 
proposing to him conscious control. 

The three things he does not want are 
these. 

He does not want bad unconscious control 
— the habit of giving without knowing It, 
wrong orders to the body. 

He does not want good unconscious con- 
trol. Good, unconscious control which one 
merely has the good luck to inherit, which 
one does not understand the details or the 



1 88 Invisible Exercise 

means of, which one gets without knowing 
how one gets it, is an unsafe kind of control 
for a man to have as his sole dependence. 
Not knowing how he gets it, he does not have 
at command when he loses it, any conscious 
deliberate or sure way to get it back. Mil- 
lions of the men who break down in middle 
life are worse off than even some chronic 
invalids, because good unconscious control is 
all they have. 

The third kind of control a man does not 
want — for which conscious control should be 
substituted — is the control a man has by sit- 
ting in a special kind of chair or by using 
some guide or support, or wearing a brace. 

What every man wants instead of these is 
some way of being sure of himself, some 
method by which he can so give conscious 
orders to his body that in anything he has to 
do, in any position he has to do it, in any 
time and any place, he can search out for 
himself his own line of least resistance. 

This is what each man is supposed to be 
doing in studying for his own use the follow- 
ing directions for a practice-drill in sitting 
down. He is taking a short-cut to his own 
comfort, by studying his conscious orders for 
control. That is to say, he is getting the 
mastery once for all, of his means of health, 



The Sit-Down Drill 189 

of his conscious orders for control, and then 
by sheer habit (except for emergencies) put- 
ting forever all thought of the means out of 
the way. 



IV 
SITTING ORDERS 

Take a medium-height chair and sit on it 
as if it were a pivot. The most favoring 
thing to do usually is to sit on the edge of the 
chair. In any case see to it that neither the 
bottom of the chair nor the back gives you 
any guiding support. Sit in such a way that 
you have nothing but the balance you are giv- 
ing your body yourself, to make you com- 
fortable or to keep you from falling. 

Take another chair, one that has a hori- 
zontal piece across the middle of the back 
which can be taken hold of from above by 
the hands. 

Place this chair two feet in front of the 
other one. 

Then sit quite still, delay a little and give 
yourself some reminding before you go on, 
remind yourself just where you are, precisely 
what you are there for, and precisely what 
you are going to do, and how you are going 
to do it. In other words recall yourself to 
yourself — see to it (as the suggestive old ex- 
pression goes) that instead of being beside 
190 



The Sit-Down Drill 191 

yourself, you make a collection of yourself — 
before you proceed to go on. There is rather 
more of this collecting necessary and desir- 
able and even agreeable— when one once 
learns how to do it — than a man would quite 
suppose at first. 

What I used to put myself through at first, 
before I let myself begin my orders to my 
back was something like this. I give it merely 
as a sample. Usually a man comes to know 
himself best and can make up privately for 
his own use, some order of self-collecting and 
self-reminding, worded to suit his own case, 
but here is what might be called the spirit of 
what it would be like, in mine : 

I sit on this chair. 

I balance my body. 

I even balance my mind. 

I decide once for all — no matter how long it 
takes — I am not going to be prevented in 
what I am about to do, by my mind — by any 
little unconscious habit my mind may have 
tow^ard my body — which it is going to try 
of course, if it can, to put over on me now — 
slide in in front of the new habit I prefer. 

No fear. 

No hurry. 

No effort. 

No mooning. 

No tumptj'-tumming. 

No mere rescuing or recovering. 



ii92 Invisible Exercise 

Then I give the orders in the larger type lock- 
stitch fashion, one unfolding out of the other 
progressively. 

I Relax My Neck (I make my mind stop 
cramping my neck). 

I Let My Head Go Up and Forward* 
(That is to say, having got my neck unlocked 
and out of the way, my head which belongs 
further up and wants to go further up, is 
allowed to go). I do not make my head 
go up. I let it. I stop preventing it. 

I Let My Back Widen and Lengthen. 
(I free the spring in it that makes it want 
to stretch its natural length and its full 
strength. A back naturally prefers doing 
what it has to do, as a long lever rather 
than a short one. The second it is allowed 
to, it relieves itself. I do not make it 
lengthen. I let it. I stop preventing it.) 

As you sit in your chair, lean forward when 
you have given these three orders. Lean 
forward as slightly as you can— invisibly. 
Then repeat the orders four times like this: 
I Relax My Neck in Order to Let My 
Head Go Up and Forward in Order to 
Let My Back Widen and Lengthen in 
Order to Lean Forward a Quarter of 
AN Inch. As you repeat this order each 
time poise forward the whole body a quarter 
of an inch. After giving this order the first 
time, give it three times with your body a 
quarter of an inch further forward each 
time until at the end of the four orders you 
are poised forward an inch, 

♦Invisibly forward— poised a shade of a line further 
than vertical. 



The Sit-Down Drill 193 

Then give the four orders a second time — tak- 
ing up a quarter of an inch each time — until 
you are poised forward two inches. 

Then three inches. 

Then four. 

In your new position of leaning forward 
about four inches in your chair (your arms 
relaxed and your hands in your lap) lift your 
arms up and out as you would in yawning and 
stretching until they are above the top of the 
chair ahead. 

Still giving orders to relax the neck and to 
let the head go forward and up, and the back 
widen and lengthen, swing the hands down 
slowly and let them alight on the top of the 
horizontal cross-piece in the middle of the back 
of the chair ahead. Take hold of the cross- 
piece lightly with fingers in front and the 
thumbs behind. See that your elbows are free 
and that your hands are precisely parallel, and 
holding on to the chair with your fingers just 
hard enough to keep the fingers from slipping, 
and still ordering your neck to relax and your 
head to go forward and up and your back to 
widen and lengthen, pull your hands apart and 
widen your back yourself. By pulling your 
hands apart you soon feel your back widening 
behind you, while you pull. 

Repeat this poising forward quarter of an 
inch and pulling four times. Before the motion 
each time give the order "Quarter forward" 
and after you have relaxed your neck and made 
it, give yourself a receipt for it saying "First 
Quarter." Repeat in the same way. 

Quarter forward Second Quarter 

Quarter forward Third Quarter 

Quarter forward Fourth Quarter. 



194 Invisible Exercise 

Pull with incredible slightness — that is with 
a slightness you would not believe you are cap- 
able of — until you learn. This exercise in wid- 
ening the back is an exercise in learning an ease. 
It is in learning the new ease that the new 
strength comes of itself. Do not indulge in 
the weakness which your mind will probably 
try to trick you into, if it can, the weakness 
of trying to be strong; keep giving the order 
to this end all the while, over and over to 
yourself. I Relax My Neck in Order to 
Let My Head Go Up and Forward (Let 
It, Not Make It) and in Order to Let My 
Back Widen and Lengthen. 

After pulling your hands apart, as you lean 
forward to the chair in front, widening your 
back four times, spread your knees to rise. 
Then relax your neck to let your head go for- 
ward and up and widen and lengthen your 
back, and with your hips moving slowly for- 
ward and your knees slowly backward, rise and 
stand on your feet. 

You have finished the sitting-down exer- 
cise. One of the best tests by which you can 
know you are right in it, is that in any position 
you are in, you are in neutral, you feel your- 
self in balance, forward and backward, upl 
and down and can reverse in a flash at any 
time. 



STANDING ORDERS 

Take the He-down exercise as given before, 
which you end standing on your feet. 

Take the sit-down exercise as before, which 
you end standing on your feet. 

Then proceed to give yourself the stand-up 
orders as follows ; 

I stand on my feet. 
I balance my body. 
I balance my mind. 

No fear. 

No hurry. 

No effort. 

No mooning. 

No tumpty-tumming. 

No mere recovering. 

(The Six Nos are to be used or omitted or 
partly omitted according to one's need or 
mood at the moment. After one finds one- 
self acting on them, of course, the acting on 
them alone is itself an order.) 
I start and gather and aim my body to lean 

forward half an inch. 

I say No ; I stop to aim my body over again 

before I lean forward half an inch. 

I relax my neck, let my head go up and 

I9S 



196 Invisible Exercise 

forward and let my back lengthen and widen 
to lean forward half an inch. 

Now in this better position and holding the 
position lightly, effortlessly, I lean forward not 
half an inch but an eighth of an inch. 

End of my first eighth of an inch forward. 

Holding my eighth of an inch forward; I 
start and aim my body to lean forward a second 
eighth of an inch. 

I say No; I stop to aim my body over again 
before I lean forward. Relaxing my neck and 
letting my head go up and forward and my 
back lengthen, I lean forward my second 
eighth of an inch. 

End of second eighth. 

Holding my two eighths of an inch forward 
I go through the same order for the third 
eighth. 

End of third eighth. 

I repeat the same orders for the fourth 
eighth. 

End of half inch. 

Standing and balancing this half inch for- 
ward I start and aim to rise on my toes. I say 
No, and before I go up on my toes, I relax my 
neck and put my head forward and up and 
lengthen my back to rise on my toes. 

Holding this position of the neck and the 
head and the back and still leaning forward 
my half inch, I rise on my toes invisibly, inside 
my shoes and without the heels of my shoes 
leaving the floor. ; 

I return to the floor and aim and start my 
body to rise on my toes again. I stop and say 
No, and relax my neck and put my head for- 
ward and up and lengthen my back to have my 



Standing Orders 197 

lengthened back help me; I rise on my toes 
and stop, so that a sheet of blotting paper would 
barely go under my heels. 

I return to the floor. I repeat the above 
orders to rise on my toes, making each rise 
with my neck and my back and checking each 
rise at eighth of an inch until, one-eighth of 
an inch at a time, with my neck relaxed and 
my back lengthened, and leaning forward my 
half inch, I am standing on tip-toe at last a 
little less high than I can, less high than I want 
to, and with a sense of power in reserve. I 
return to the floor and still leaning forward 
my half inch and still relaxing my neck and 
putting my head forward and up and still 
lengthening my back, I walk away. 

The spirit or conception of this exercise — the 
way one feels as one takes it — is the feeling of 
yawning and stretching, the balance of tension 
and relaxation described in the Practice Notes 
later, in the chapter dealing with The Tiptoe 
Yawn. 

On the technical side, of course, the gist of 
the exercise is the obduracy with which one says 
No before one fills the order for each motion, 
stops and makes it all over again with the neck 
relaxed still more, and the head forward and 
up still more, but taking one's new position 
with the No in the lead, with the inhibition in 
full control — taking it always a very little more 
than one has — and always very much less than 
one can, and usually much less than one wants 
to. 

Standing on tiptoe like this, with the back 
lightly doing it for one, with toes effortless 
and with feet as if they were not there, and 



198 Invisible Exercise 

apparently — so far as one can feel — no legs to 
speak of, is the quintessence of exercise. 

This exercise alone taken five, ten or fifteen 
minutes in all in a day, puts all the gathering 
and coordinating forces of all other exercises 
combined, into one single colossal, almost mo- 
tionless motion. 



VI 

mXRODUCING THE WALKING ORDERS 

One of the things a man should arrange 
for first in any good walking exercise is the 
humbling of the hips, the placing before the 
mind of a very clear vivid conception of just 
what it is that is happening to him when he 
wiggles. 

It needs to be remembered and reiterated 
by every man many times in getting his new 
control that the main difficulty that any set- 
ting-up exercise, whether it is for standing, 
sitting, walking or lying in bed, should be 
planned to meet, is the common tendency 
many men have all the time — and most men 
have now and then — to regard the stomach 
and put forward the stomach as the center 
of being. 

If a man wiggles in walking it is because 
he is trying, as it were, to walk around his 
stomach. 

The abdomen remains in charge of the 

whole undertaking — keeps complacently the 

center-front stage — and any little thing the 

back or the legs may do, or want to do about 

199 



200 Invisible Exercise. 

one's walking, has to be done in any little 
ways that can be worked in around it. The 
back is curved in to accommodate it, to give 
it more overhang, and the hips, shoulders 
and feet sway around, of course, as best they 
can, in any way that is left over to them after 
the abdomen is through. Of course, a man 
who is going down the street trying to walk 
out around his stomach — generally both sides 
at once, or trying now on one side and now 
another — naturally lurches, loses his balance 
and has a heavy step. His stomach having 
been, instead of his spine, set up as his center 
of being, makes him go out around. This is 
the secret at one and the same time of his 
thump when he walks and of his sog when 
he sits. 

The same person sleeps with a thud. 



To sum up, one sees that the four common 
mistakes the average man makes whether in 
walking, standing, sitting or lying down, are 
one and the same mistake. 

Walking around one's stomach. 

Standing and leaning on it. 

Sitting on it. 

Lying down with it in the way — that is: 
going to bed and forgetting when one goes 



Walking Orders 201 

to sleep to put it carefully up for the night 
— having the backbone draw it up high 
enough to work, draw it in, and draw it back 
where it will not be over-relaxed and dis- 
tended and try to do its work out of place. 
But it is while walking that this tendency 
of the abdomen to take charge of an im- 
mortal soul and calmly, publicly and with 
everybody looking on, walk off with it, is the 
most discoverable, likely to be of the most 
concern to a man and therefore, the most 
likely to be corrected. 



vn 

WALKING ORDERS 

Take the He-down exercise and sit. 

Take the sitting exercise and stand. 

Take the standing exercise and walk four 
steps. 

Take the standing exercise four times and 
walk four steps after it each time. 

Do the stepping precisely as you do the stand- 
ing — poised invisibly forward — giving the 
order to your neck to relax and your head to 
go up and forward and your back to lengthen 
and widen. 

After taking the exercise ending it with four 
steps, end it with eight. Then with sixteen. 

Then gradually increase until you can bal- 
ance yourself along sixteen hundred steps as 
perfectly as you can sixteen and can walk the 
length of a street as easily and as perfectly as 
you can walk across it. 

If possible, in your first practicing, walk 
toward a full length mirror down a room and 
judge and revise your balancing by the way 
it looks as well as by the way it feels. 

Each time as you do the four-step or eight- 
step balance toward the glass, balance your four 
or eight steps backward from the glass, taking 
your stand-up exercise at both ends of the trip. 

In so far as practicable during the time 



Walking Orders 203 

you are learning your new back-control and 
breaking in your new habit in walking, it is 
best not to walk at all except in very small 
allowances and when you do, do what you 
do perfectly. You will soon begin to enjoy 
your new coordination so much that it will 
take care of itself. You will come to look 
upon walking as a more active and congenial 
lying down — a yawning or stretching up of 
the back adapted to street use — a way, a 
rather polite and decorous way, of sleeping 
in public. A man I know who used to retire 
to his inner office in the middle of the day 
every day, and take a ten-minute siesta flat 
on his back, daily looks forward to his little 
nip of a walk after luncheon now, as to a 
noon-day nap. 

A good thing to do when you are perfect- 
ing your control and find yourself slipping 
into the old habit and letting your coordina- 
tion in the back run down, is to stop every 
block or half block before a show window, 
release your neck and wind up your back. 
Then balance yourself along another block. 
Then try two, then four, always keeping the 
back wound up ahead. 

Many other simple, but conclusive ways of 
training one's new brain-track toward a co- 
ordinated walk — toward making a fixed habit 



204 Invisible Exercise 

of walking as a quicker way to rest — might 
be mentioned, but I leave them to be dealt 
with at better advantage in the Handbook 
of Practice Notes. 

But whatever form one's practice may 
take, the first thing and the important thing 
to arrange for and to keep in the forefront 
of one's mind is an accurate and conclusive 
conception as to just what walking is like. 

What one comes to, when one looks into 
it and tries it out, is this: 

Walking is not primarily a leg exercise. 

One's walking is a falling along as it were, 
and what one's legs are for is to be there 
in time, of course, to catch one. Not much 
more. The main pleasure in walking lies 
above the hips and comes in freeing and 
stretching the back. One naturally and inci- 
dentally flourishes the legs in walking and 
even the arms, but the place to be tired first 
and most and the place to be refreshed first 
and most is the back. 

A good many times a day during the first 
week I was practicing for my new and more 
perfect alignment in walking, in order to 
keep myself reminded I would stop in the 
middle of a block full head-on, catch myself 
up out of my old habitual superficial ener- 



Walking Orders 205 

getic gait and before I took another step, 
hold myself to the point like this : 

Walking is a balancing exercise toward 
somewhere. What I am attempting in this 
next block is a falling forward with delicacy 
and precision. What I have to do now for this 
next block is to remember that walking is as 
easy as falling down hill and catching myself 
—catching myself just the right thousandth of 
a second. 

Of course, when a man gets so that he 
can remember an actual fact like this about 
himself — remember who he is and what he 
is like for one block, when he gets so that he 
can do one block of being his real self he 
soon finds he can do two more easily, three 
still more easily, and so on and so on, until he 
can be a real man a mile. 

He comes to have and to expect to have 
a sense in walking, of being propelled, of 
being floated or wafted forward from be- 
hind. 

This last statement Is not an exaggeration. 

If the average machine-coddled, civilized, 
auto-ized, demotorized lift-lazy man wants 
to think that this way of saying what walking 
is like, is rhetorical, let him try it. All he 
has to do is to quit — say for four weeks — 
walking with dim distant difficult awkward 



2o6 Invisible Exercise 

arrangements like legs and begin swinging 
himself off down the street with his back 
and his brains — the twenty-six brains in his 
back — and before his four weeks are up, I 
venture to say he will be accusing me of un- 
derstatement. 

No man who does this, who uses his top- 
brain to walk with and the twenty-six brains, 
or control-finders — the twenty-six adjusters 
and spirit-levels strung down his back — no 
man who makes himself remember — makes 
his twenty-six vertabrae remember who he is, 
will wonder at the statement that true walk- 
ing consists in the feeling of being propelled. 

The feeling of being propelled one has 
when one is walking like one's real self — the 
sense of upness and fQrwardness, of feeling 
taller and further forward than one can be- 
lieve one really is — almost seems to come at 
first as from some mysterious force outside. 
All one has to do is to guide the thing and 
keep from flying. 

When a man first has his new control in 
hand, comes down to New York, begins 
walking up The Avenue as if he owned it, he 
finds himself walking with a slight slanting 
sensation. He turns back to where he has 
been walking to see if The Avenue can really 
be as level as it looked. It's as if sidewalks 



Walking Orders 207 

in New York when He came along tilted a 
little. 

Streets bow before him. 

He carries down-hill about with him wher- 
ever he goes. 



vm 

SLIDING SCALE OF ORDERS 

These four drills are not to be looked 
upon as permanent, as they stand. They are 
for the first stages of practice. 

Gradually as one dramatizes each order, 
puts it into the motion, one grows more curt 
with it — sums it all up in a word — strips It 
almost down to the motion Itself. 

There are different degrees of stripping 
down the orders according to the precise con- 
dition, the momentary stage of needing to be 
reminded, a man Is in. 

If a man catches himself hurrying he needs 
to give the specific order not to hurry. And, 
of course, this Is true of all the others. 

For some of us when we are going through 
the series In an exercise, a good way to do is 
to give the orders In full panoply the first 
time. The rest of the four times as we re- 
peat the motions, we Include the orders In 
them without specifying them. 

Of course, all the orders when one has once 
learned Invisible Exercise, funnel down into 
three. 

208 



Sliding Scale of Orders 209 

Whether it is aiming one's body at a chair 
to sit down, or aiming one's body to give just 
the right swing to a bat to hit the ball, or to 
a billiard cue to hit the ball, or to a fountain 
pen to hit an idea, — whatever it is one is do- 
ing — one does it all over, gathers, focuses, 
funnels and aims all the forces of one's mind 
and body and gives these three orders : 

I aim my body to do this. 

I say No and relax my neck, let my head go 
up and forward and lengthen my back to aim 
to do it. 

I do it. 

And these three orders funnel into one. 

I (with relaxed neck, head forward and up 
and back lengthened and widened) DO IT. 

The subject, the verb and the object. 

The parenthesis of inhibition, of delay 
with two hundred pages of this book whisked 
into it, is the Adverb. 



IX 

FIFTH DRILL 

I have confided to the reader four drills — 
the orders for lying down, for sitting down, 
and the standing orders and walking orders. 

The Fifth Drill consists in the reader's 
holding in for a little longer and not taking 
the others. 

I have put the directions for learning the 
Exercises at this point in my book because I 
have wanted to be concrete and human in ex- 
pressing my idea and have my reader feel 
I am placing before him something to do to 
understand it, as well as something to read. 

Except for a few innocent illustrative 
flourishes by which the reader goes through 
the exercises as he turns the leaves — makes a 
kind of diagram as he reads, out of his own 
body — it is only fair to say that the drills 
as I have just traced them out are only in- 
tended to be taken as a bird's-eye view of the 
idea at this point, and that, of course, when 
the reader gets down to details, begins to 
learn the drills and really get the benefit of 
them, he is supposed to do it after reading 

2IO 



The Fifth Drill 211 

the rest of the book, and with the Practice 
Notes and the necessary illustrative and ex- 
planatory comments that should go with 
drills of this kind at hand. 

The motions brought forward in these 
four exercises are brought forward as prac- 
tical and definite means each man's mind can 
employ for getting a new control of his body. 

But it is his mind that must employ these 
means. 

So the one really important thing in taking 
these four drills is the reader's mind. 

And if he will allow me to say it, I think 
he ought to exercise it more — a little more 
with this book — before he begins off-hand 
taking the drill in it. 

It would not be fair to the reader if, in- 
stead of coming to the exercise as he should 
have a chance to, as I did, through the idea 
in it, he should be plumped into it without 
its meaning anything to him. 

In any honest and effective idea one tries 
to carry out for the body the conception — 
what one is seeing and feeling when one is 
embodying it, what one means by it — is the 
main practical means one has for embody- 
ing it. 

The most superficial and injurious aspect 
of :exercise today is the way trainers and 



212 Invisible Exercise 

other faithful and dutiful people and writers 
of exercise books have, of waving people's 
minds away and giving people the idea that 
if they make certain motions — motions they 
have not even conceived — the motions w'ill 
somehow mysteriously and in due time, be 
delivered of new bodies for them. 

Men who are always using their brains in 
everything else, stop them when they take an 
exercise. They start their precious members 
going and go off and leave them. They seem 
to think they can roll their eyes at the heav- 
ens, work their arms and legs like wooden 
handles of health, and pump themselves into 
bliss. 

I do not like to publish these four drills 
without a warning to some of my readers. It 
is not the amount of time or the amount of 
effort, but the amount of conception — the 
amount of cross-fertilization between the 
body and the mind — which determines in a 
setting-up exercise its permanence, quality, 
material power and value. 

Each man's self-control when he is aiming 
a ball has to be conceived in his own mind, 
and each man's self-control in each motion of 
these drills is for him to originate. It would 
be cheating my reader in this book if I hurried 
him through to the exercise itself past the 



The Fifth Drill 213 

idea it is made of, or if I tried to present to 
him some self-control outright instead of let- 
ting him have the fun of pursuing and con- 
ceiving it himself. It would be like doing 
a man's eating for him, handing over to him 
— if there were such a thing — cheap ready- 
made self-control done up neatly with a blue 
ribbon on it, in an exercise. 

Of course, many of my readers do not 
need perhaps these cautions in their behalf. 
But there are others. 

If I could, I would have the fifteen pages 
of the book containing the drills printed with 
adjustably invisible ink. 

The pages would go blank to people as 
fast as they had read them. The minute 
people stopped reading them, stood up before 
them and began practicing them, they would 
fade away. 

But the ink would instantly recognize, like 
litmus paper, the difference between one 
mind and another. All any man who had 
read his way all through the book as he 
should, and properly dipped his mind in it, 
would have to do when he turned back to the 
blank pages, would be to warm the paper 
with his mind a minute, and the four drills 
would at once blossom out for him — blossom 
out just for him — privately. 



214 Invisible Exercise 

As his mind would be there, the drills 
would do for him what they are expected to. 

Of course, if what one is doing is changing 
a habit of one^s mind with one's body— reco- 
ordinating one's mind with one's body — they 
must both be there. 

The next section deals with getting the at- 
tention of a mind. 



Ill 

GETTING THE ATTENTION OF A MIND 



A WORKING CONCEPTION OF SELF-CONTROL: 
THE SELF-CONTROL OF ANIMALS 

I HAVE got more of an idea of what the 
real basis of self-control is, and of how 
to get the attention of my own mind, from 
my dog than from anybody. 

Tomtom is a fox terrier and, of course, as 
one is apt to be with a fox terrier, I did not 
take him very seriously at first and thought 
he was merely an amusing cuss. I named him 
naturally after Mount Tom — the biggest 
thing in sight — because he was so serious 
about himself and went about with the air of 
being in a small way at the very least a moun- 
tain — a mountain who, to be accommodating 
and convenient, just for us — had taken the 
form of a little dog. 

The first time I took him seriously — as 
seriously as he did, and was really consider- 
ably impressed — was one day out under the 
maple tree when I watched him thinking out 
how he was going to lie down on the ground. 

When Tomtom lies down, like the Chinese 
with Tea, he makes a regular ceremonial of 
217 



2i8 Invisible Exercise 

it. He really has an idea. He does what he 
does through the idea. No plump or super- 
ficial lazy lunge about it — about lying down 
on the ground — for Tomtom. He circles 
around slowly and thoughtfully, says No to 
himself, gives a dramatic pause, sees just 
what his idea is. Then he dramatizes it. 

Tomtom lies down as if he were laying the 
foundations of a cathedral. Then when he 
has got his foundations all in, deliberately, 
solemnly he places his nose — rereplaces his 
nose — as the corner stone of sleep. 

When he gets up he is equally intellectual 
about it, seems equally determined in getting 
at what he is doing through the idea in it. 
He opens his eyes, takes a wink at the idea 
of getting up, says No to it, and so as not to 
be superficial and meaningless in a deep pre- 
cipitous thing like coming back into a world, 
he closes his eyes again. No use in lunging 
back into a world like this, without meaning 
anything by it or without anticipating it ! 

Then he gets up, stretches out his fore- 
paws blissfully, stretches out his back long 
and slow, practically counting off his verta- 
brae, stringing out his idea of getting up along 
on them one at a time. Then gradually hav- 
ing in one detail after the other, pulled his 
mind and body together from his forepaws to 



Conception of Self -Control 219 

his hind ones, from the tip of his nose to the 
tip of his tail, he is ready for business. 

It is because a dog not only has the letter 
of the idea of exercise, but the spirit of it — 
the very soul of the idea of it — that he gets 
so much out of his setting-up exercises. 

His whole life becomes a setting-up exer- 
cise. If a man would keep studying his posi- 
tion, studying his coordination — if a man 
would be as intellectual, as spiritual about his 
coordination as a dog is — his whole life in- 
stead of being something he has to rest or 
recover from, or set himself up from, would 
be a setting-up exercise in itself. 

This is why instead of putting a diagram 
at the end of this chapter I am just referring 
everybody to the nearest dog. This is my 
idea of what I would want to do, in a book 
on exercise or on health. When people come 
to the conventional lazy place in a book where 
an author is supposed to put a diagram in and 
when they feel their old craving for a dia- 
gram coming on and they feel as if they posi- 
tively must have one, all I can do is to ask 
them to lay the book down and to refer them 
to the nearest dog, the nearest baby, or any 
plain standard cat. 

Living diagrams everybody has at hand or 
within reach are not only more pictorial, more 



2 20 Invisible Exercise 

lively, more fetching, but they are harder to 
misunderstand than squeegees of ink with 
A's, B's and C's and arrows on them. 

Another important point, too, is that a dog 
or a baby or a cat — any self-respecting little 
brute — when putting over an idea, can always 
be trusted to give the soul of the thing. 

And he makes it catching. 

Any fairly well-regulated sympathetic man 
yawns when his dog does. 

And the main thing after all in a book on 
health like this should be to make it catch- 
ing. "Damn diagrams!" Tomtom says as 
he looks me earnestly in the eyes; and I will 
say that one nice little sensible brute always 
going around with a man, who will be nice 
to the man, and encourage him — let the man 
share his feelings with him — will uplift the 
ordinary civilized human creature as much — 
do as much real good to him, in starting him 
on the right way — as a hundred diagrams. 

It was a considerable understatement of 
Solomon's, '*Go to the ant, thou sluggard." 

Many other bugs might have been given 
honorable mention by Solomon. Almost any 
animal — once really known down through — 
would be an inspiration. 



OUR DOGS AND US 

Why is It a dog eats a bone as coolly as a 
girl eats a marshmallow ? 

Why is it there is nothing bewildering or 
insoluble about a bone to a dog? 

Why is it he assimilates it — makes it over 
into perfectly good dog — while he is asleep? 

Why is it that the man right beside the 
dog — the man who owns the dog — does not 
even own himself? Why is it that the man 
puts up with predigested baby foods, puts up 
with having his insides practically abandoned, 
by himself, by his doctor — puts up with actu- 
ally having things steered away from his 
mouth for him and steered into his mouth 
for him — by Eugene Christian, or by Vance 
Thompson? 

Because a man has a lower standard of 
self-control than a dog. 

A dog never has for a single minute In his 
life a low Immoral way of looking upon self- 
control as a duty. 

A dog's self-control Is deeper and more 



222 Invisible Exercise 

subliminal than a man's. The average civil- 
ized man when he eats, is a superficial palate- 
monger. He controls his choice of food by 
the way it strikes him first, by his mere first 
impressions located around the entrance of 
his alimentary canal. The dog chooses his 
food twenty feet deep. He eats all over and 
all through. The pleasure of peristaltic ac- 
tion is much greater to a dog than the pleas- 
ure of eating. He gets over eating as fast 
as he can. Then he makes blissful motions 
and takes blissful positions that make him 
keep enjoying what he eats all the time. The 
:essence of the quietness, the implacableness, 
the dignity, the finality of a dog's self-control 
is that a dog has an appetite as anyone can 
see — an almost ungovernable appetite — for 
taking pleasant positions and making com- 
fortable motions. His self-control consists in 
devoting his attention to habits of making 
himself comfortable. He studies posture so 
profoundly, so unintermittently and while he 
is going about his regular duties, that he 
never needs to moon over a cook book. Does 
one ever see a dog hanging around Vance 
Thompson or yearning over Mahdah 
Menus? Does one catch a dog going to 
forty doctors to be examined, to the Life Ex- 
tension Institute twice a year with his eternal 



Our Dogs and Us 223 

little urine in a bottle? Why is it one does 
not see a dog having spells — ^w^hat can only 
be called tantrums of health — as we do? 

Because he is heaping up health in himself 
all the while, without thinking of how he 
ought to be well at all — by just thinking as 
he goes about his regular business, of com- 
fortable positions — ^positions he looks up and 
likes. 

The time never comes when he stops think- 
ing and thinking hard, subconsciously or con- 
sciously, of the nice comfortable little things 
he likes to do and when he thinks of them 
he does them. Every lamp post he sees, 
makes him think of a little something and 
instead of dreaming about it he does it. 

And this is not diabetes but consistency — 
a kind of moral dignity. It is this habit of 
instant suiting of the action to the thought, 
carried faithfully into the higher reaches of 
his being in his intercourse with man, which 
makes the dog what he is, to everyone who 
knows him — a gentleman and a scholar and 
in no need of being a Christian — as a man is 
— in order to be put up with. 

Anyone can see how it is. A man lets him- 
self get obsessed by his work or by his play. 
Then he has a beautiful noble-looking time 
of feeling religious and of putting on spiritual 



224 Invisible Exercise 

airs and feeling very superior to the poor 
worldly little dog beside him who never 
thinks of his sins. The man sits down with 
his head between his hands and wonders 
about himself, putters and whines and yearns 
and thinks how he is missing what he really 
wants. 

The dog never putters nor whines nor 
thinks of his sins. He thinks what he wants 
and gets it. 

A dog is straight, simple and pure and ab- 
solutely self-controlled. As he never stops 
thinking what he really wants; he never has 
any sins to think of. 

The reason a man loses his self-control Is 
that he has less power than a dog, appar- 
ently, to make himself stop and think what 
he really wants. 

Any boy or girl, or man or woman who 
will follow a little while the principle the dog 
does, who will consider being comfortable 
with the same amount of brains, will have 
the most important possession and the most 
fundamental education any human being can 
have for this mortal life. A boy who is prop- 
erly educated may be said to be a boy who is 
trained to get the attention of his body to 
what he wants, to handle his body in the 
most perfect and therefore the easiest way. 



Our Dogs and Us 225 

He has at command an almost automatic 
principle for self-control. His mere com- 
fort, his pleasure itself, his very self-indul- 
gence, becomes his guide philosopher and 
friend. Health with a man as with an alli- 
gator instead of being a duty becomes a self- 
indulgence. 

The basic fact in a man's joy in life, Is the 
conscious sense of power, the feeling of one's 
power when one is using it, of heaping up 
still more while one is using it. A man soon 
finds that self-control with his body is the 
utmost fun he can have with it. 

An alligator eats a pair of pantaloons just 
as so much pie-crust on a man — digests a suit 
of clothes, an IngersoU watch, a bunch of 
keys and all without a sigh — because he has 
a habit of furious joy in self-control. He can 
put through anything. If an alligator for a 
flash of a second ever gets to the point where 
he looks upon self-control as a duty instead 
of a passion, he is sick. 

And all that the plain rather simple-minded 
alligator's self-control amounts to. Is his 
homely direct lifelong study of what the 
whole alligator prefers. No going by the 
palate. No gullet judgment for him. He 
lives in a perfect orgy of knowing what he 
wants all through — of keeping it looked up 



2 26 Invisible Exercise 

and put down — every i of comfort dotted 
and every t crossed. His life is one long 
splendid lark of self-control. 

I have confided to the reader in this chap- 
ter the gist of the idea to which I have come 
through as my own personal, every-day work- 
ing conception of self-control. 

What this conception of self-control has 
led me to do when I came to apply it prac- 
tically to taking my exercise in lying down, 
no one need be long in guessing. 

I watched my dog circling to lie down and 
saw how he usually decided to do it, and I 
then proposed to myself (of course allowing 
for the differences between his figure and 
mine) as good an imitation of Tomtom's 
circling to lie down as I could make. 

A dog not only studies lying down in gen- 
eral, but he stops to study once more, each 
new time he tries. 

My idea was to get the principle — the 
spirit of the thing — from Tomtom and then 
work out the details as applied to a two- 
legged problem like myself. 



m 

WHAT ANY MAN CAN LEARN FROM A DOG 

When I began imitating my dog the first 
thing I came on was that I did not really care 
about being comfortable in lying down as 
fiercely as Tomtom did. When I circled to 
lie down, I slurred over details. 

Obviously, as this was the hub of the whole 
thing, and as everything would have to start 
out from my facing this fact first, I began 
seeing if there was not some way I could 
corner myself, mind and body, into noticing 
just how uncomfortable and just how com- 
fortable I was. What could I do in lying 
down to put myself in some position where I 
would be compelled to be really thoughtful — 
really intellectual — about lying down, like a 
dog? 

I made several useful discoveries to this 
end. 

My first discovery was the floor. One 
morning up in my study I took two copies of 
The Springfield Republican, spread them on 
the floor for my body to rest on and two 
books (one of them was Browne's Mystery 
227 



228 Invisible Exercise 

of Space) to rest my head and began my 
study of lying down. I let myself take turns, 
lying first on one side on the floor. Then 
the other side. Then on my back. I added 
a pillow to the books when I was on my side. 

Perhaps I need not say that the act of ly- 
ing down which had always bored me before, 
became at once a very thoughtful, intellect- 
ually absorbing and almost thrilling occupa- 
tion. 

As I had to study how not to ache or how 
not to wear through in spots, I found myself 
every time I took the exercise, after the first 
second or so, thinking hard as well as lying 
hard. I began quite eagerly working out 
positions I would rather be in. 

The trouble with a bed is that a man gets 
into a routine of being comfortable in a 
bed. 

In the beginning stage when one is begin- 
ning to teach one's self to be as fiercely inter- 
ested in lying down as a dog, lying on a hun- 
dred-dollar mattress or bed of down muffles 
one's lying down wrong, and obscures one's 
being out of shape, makes one suppose one 
is resting more than one is. The sleep one 
gets is heavy and superficial because the back 
is not obliged to coordinate the body, and the 
parts of the body that need to be tensed — 



What One Can Learn from a Dog 229 

to be held together to make the right electric 
or nerve connections for sleep — are not held 
together by the back, and the parts that 
should be relaxed are too tense. 

If one Is lying on the floor, one learns 
quickly, not because one ought to, but because 
one likes to. There is no fooling one's self, 
no idle foolish preferring to lie in a less co- 
ordinated, i.e., a less comfortable position — 
because one has the habit of it. 

My next discovery after the floor was a 
board. I nailed two wide boards together 
with cross pieces at the ends, and made as it 
were, a kind of human Ironing board, and 
put it under the cover of the couch in my 
study. Then I began ironing out my back on 
that. 

Having already found that I was enjoying 
the floor in my study quite as much as the 
view — that it was becoming such a frequent 
pastime and relief to He on it — (I felt on the 
floor quite like lolling in an easy chair) I had 
begun to feel that perhaps some more perma- 
nent and dignified arrangement than The 
Springfield Republican for having all the com- 
forts of a floor, was called for. 

But, of course, I am not saying I am in 
favor of sleeping on a board any more than I 
am in favor of not sitting in easy chairs. I 



230 Invisible Exercise 

am always lying down on as soft a bed as I 
like now, just as I am always sitting in easy 
chairs, but from the point of view of learning 
and establishing a new habit — a new accu- 
rately comfortable position for the back in 
lying down — a mattress, at first at least, can- 
not seem to get one's attention. On a board, 
one soon gets the attention of one's mind. 
One soon gets more solid comfort out of lying 
down right on a board, than out of lying 
down wrong on a feather bed. 

Then the crisis is passed. The more one's 
comfort comes from one's self, the deeper it 
strikes into one's nature and the more im- 
placably it stands by one, all one's life. 

On the same principle that at Battle Creek 
the doctors will almost parboil a man's back 
one minute and then put ice on it the next, 
to get the attention of his mind to his body 
and start the vital forces up; and on the same 
principle that Muldoon crucifies a man's flesh 
and excoriates his soul — leans him or makes 
him think he is being leaned over the mouth 
of hell — all to give him the psychological 
shock that will start his attention up, focus 
him and make him really study what he is 
about — on this same principle, when I wanted 
to get myself to study as hard as a dog does, 
how to lie down, I used the floor of my 



What One Can Learn from a Dog 231 

study and a Springfield Republican for a mat- 
tress. 

I have dwelt a little longer than I meant 
to in this chapter on the floor or on the board 
as a device for learning promptly to lie down, 
but I have wanted to bring out the point, 
which seems to be quite incredibly overlooked, 
that lying down comfortably is at bottom a 
matter of brains — a matter of getting the 
people who think they have them, to take ly- 
ing down seriously — to get them to see they 
must use their brains and use them a good 
(deal if they are going to lie down as well 
as a dog does. 



IV 
GOING FORWARD TO NATURE 



I 

FOLKS AND MACHINES 

A LIST of machines today would be a list 
of heaped up indictments as to the 
things human beings are no longer alive 
enough to love to do. One looks about and 
sees all these huge stupid crowds of people 
in a kind of madhouse of getting out of things 
people used to have the gusto, the gifts of 
body and mind to enjoy, things they used to 
make expressive of their own personalities, 
and of their delight in their own lives and 
the lives of others. 

When one thinks of it, it is a greater and 
more real value to feel all over like walking 
upstairs in the Equitable Building than not 
to feel chipper enough to, and take the ele- 
vator. 

What seems to be wanted to live a civilized 
life is to feel chipper just enough and take 
elevators just enough. I find I can keep up 
my sympathy with my English friend, who 
never takes elevators in New York, for the 
first four stories. Then I push the button 
and let the elevator do the other thirty-six. 

235 



236 Invisible Exercise 

After four stories or so — the first minute I 
feel like a stair-machine — I quit. 

I prefer to feel more lively about some 
other things, or I would rather save myself 
for The Matterhorn where the scenery is less 
monotonous. 

There seem to be several ways of being 
saved from drudgery or from feeling one is 
being made a machine of. One way is by 
working less — by putting it off on a machine. 
The other is by actually working more, by 
making the work harder and more interesting 
— making a game or a feat of it — linking the 
work up with people we like to do it for, or 
like to do it with, or with ideas and desires 
that make us delight in it while we do it. 

Miss — according to my morning paper, 

gives up a mansion on The Avenue, marries 
a poor man and washes her own dishes. 

And he helps wipe. 

But not everybody has the courage to elope 
from being a machine, take a deep-sea plunge 
— fling off from the hopeless round of labor- 
saving, and the treadmill of teas, and parties 
and servants. ^ 

Still it is at least an honest and treal way 
to do, which some people try. 

Another way that many people — In fact, 
most people who hate themselves for feeling 



Folks and Machines 237 

like machines — try, is gasoline. One sees 
them motoring every afternoon — shot out of 
shops, offices, factories and parlors, racing 
away from themselves forty miles an hour- 
saving themselves from being machines with 
more machines. 

The trouble with this way seems to be that, 
by the time many people in stores, offices and 
factories have made machines of their bodies 
and machines of their souls long enough to 
earn their automobiles, they are dead. Not 
a dent or thrill can be made in them no mat- 
ter how fast they go. They get to be india- 
rubber people. They are too mechanical 
when they go out riding in an automobile to 
see more than an automobile does. They 
take a ride the way a tire would. 

Still other poor prosperous mortals, labor- 
saved within an inch of their lives hand- 
less footless who realize they are get- 
ting like their machines, but who cannot 
or who will not change the daily tumtum of 
their lives, take what they consider very vig- 
orous means to make up for the ravages 
being made upon the powers of the body by 
their machines. When they feel their ma- 
chines at work on them disembodying them 
before their own eyes, they hit back. They 
go back to Nature hard. They make elabo- 



238 Invisible ^Exercise 

rate and costly arrangements for pounding 
their abdominal muscles. One sees them in 
the numerous schools that are springing up 
today — Squirm Schools, I call them — going 
back to Nature, fairly writhing back to Na- 
ture doggedly, faithfully making little 

Samsons of their stomachs. 



PEOPLE WHO MAKE NATURE HUM: 
EXERCISE ADDICTS 

I spent a day or so with a friend a while 
ago, who was spending a few weeks at a 
Squirm School. As the people who were 
there were all there for the same purpose, 
they had all become as one might say, quite 
physiologically confidential. You would be in 
the room with three or four of them and be 
having a general pleasant sociable time and 
every now and then, before you knew it, right 
in the middle of a sentence, they would kick 
up their heels and walk across the room and 
back on their hands so as to keep their bodies 
interested in the conversation. Instead of do- 
ing mere slovenly futile little things other 
people do — changing a position, crossing or 
uncrossing a leg, or possibly taking another 
chair, or walking to a window and back, or 
yawning, or possibly taking a little familiar 
confiding stretch — the man who Is talking 
with you incidentally does a hand spring, ges- 
turing at you with his feet, or he grabs up 
a convenient baby perhaps, gives himself and 
239 



240 Invisible Exercise 

the baby both a real treat of going back to 
Nature, using the baby as a dumbbell or 
swinging him over his head like an Indian 
Club, or suddenly you will begin to see a few 
gentlemen in sober dignified looking khaki 
getting down and crawling on their stomachs, 
or they begin in a lull in conversation beating 
their stomachs like tomtoms or if they are 
walking through a field with you they step 
one side thoughtfully, and hang themselves 
up by the abdomen on a rail fence. 

The theory is that civilization and ma- 
chinery by doing everything for us physically 
and not letting us exercise the muscles around 
our vital organs are gradually disembodying 
us. All these things the people do in the 
Squirm School are done by way of being in 
real earnest about being an animal. They are 
done to save time and to hurry their bodies 
right back to Nature. To avoid nervous in- 
digestion, to correct metabolism, and to keep 
up the correct chemical synthesis of the body 
every day, take a few hours off a day for it 
and squirm it, — twirl It — twirl the poor neg- 
lected thing from a tree like a monkey. . . . 

All I have to say about this is that I be- 
lieve in going back to Nature, or rather as I 
would prefer to put it, going forward to Na- 
ture and catching up with it, as much as any- 



People Who Make Nature Hum 241: 

body, and I especially believe, as anybody 
can see from this book, that the way to catch 
up with Nature, to get control, is by taking 
a masterful hold upon the position of me- 
chanical advantage in the body. 

The only quarrel I have with people on this 
point is their being so violent about it, and 
their taking so much trouble and time. 

When Mrs. , a social and intellectual 

leader in , spends four days a week, 

eight hours a day, on her own estate as a 
farm hand and raises her own vegetables for 
her week-end parties all with her own hands, 
and when she tells me she keeps in what she 
calls glorious health by doing it, while I have 
a certain admiration for her character, I must 
say — to put it mildly — her health leaves me 
cold. I find myself being critical of it as an 
investment. Being a farm-hand — slaving 
away at hard physical labor eight hours a 
day, four days a week — seems to me a good 
deal of an undertaking, just to distribute 
around on just one woman what little food 
she can eat, and it does not seem to me what 
she is getting can fairly be said to be glorious 
health. 

It is a merely arrested ill health to have to 
work eight hours a day to digest one's food. 
If what she had could fairly be called glori- 



242 Invisible 'Exercise 

ous healthy all she would need to do for a 
rather plain humble thing like that could be 
!done in a few minutes. 

It is romantic and not matter of fact to 
take much time to be well. 

As much time as a man devotes to brush- 
ing his teeth in a day devoted to intensive 
exercise, to taking an exercise in coordinating 
his back will keep him well; as much time as 
a man devotes to shaving or a woman devotes 
to brushing her hair. 

It is low-class, physically insensible, under- 
bred and uncouth to have to exercise a great 
deal to be well. 

People who go to Squirm schools and who 
wrench themselves — use ear trumpets as it 
were to get the attention of their bodies in- 
stead of training the adjustment of the body 
as a fine and delicate instrument responding 
to the single fleck of a thought — have no real 
peace. 

As drug-addicts have to take more and 
more drugs to get their effect, exercise-ad- 
dicts, people who are working on this prin- 
ciple of using much effort and much time to 
get the attention of their bodies, break down 
the minute they stop taking the time off and 
keeping the effort up. 

The more one gets into the way of taking 



People Who Make Nature Hum 243 

special time off and entreating the body not 
to be stupid, the more dependent the body 
gets on being treated in this way and the 
more stupid it gets and the more puffing and 
sweating It takes to get an Idea into It. 

As I have said before, all one has to do to 
see how true this Is, Is to watch for a few 
days any standard dog. 



m 

LETTING NATURE BE NATURAL 

I had a visit last week with a friend — a 
well-known man of great gifts and oppor- 
tunities — who has let everything go, resigned 
or suspended himself from his position for a 
year, to correct his metabolism or chemical 
synthesis. As long as he plays golf six hours 
a day he says he has glorious health. If he 
writes one morning or if he speaks in public 
one hour his health is used up for a week. 

So he is subtracting himself from the world 
— all the powers and desires of his life — for 
a year, and is being valet to a golf ball six 
hours a day to keep well. 

The first thing I thought of was, how I 
hated to have him do it. I thought how a 
nation would hate to have Hoover do it. 

It seems to me that correcting coordination 
in this way and then getting a coordination 
one can merely use to play golf with, is not 
only an extreme and violent way to get well, 
but that it is a superficial conception of na- 
ture. It is romantic and not matter of fact 
about nature. 

244 



Letting Nature Be Natural 245' 

The most plain and simple fact about 
nature seems to be that nature is an extra- 
ordinary scheme for adapting very slight 
means to great ends, a stupendous conspiracy 
of the soul and the body of man to heap up, 
along an almost miraculous line of least re- 
sistance, a maximum of achievement. 

The last thing that is natural is a man's 
playing golf six hours a day to make his 
stomach — a happy and delectable institution 
like a stomach — wake up enough and be kind 
enough to admit (after six hours) that it is 
willing to drudge away at it once more and 
digest one more dinner for him. 

Every man who has studied his own con- 
trol finds there are certain uncoordinating 
things he does, and that if he stops doing one 
of these uncoordinating things which he has 
to do, and picks out and begins doing some 
other particular thing which he has the power 
to do naturally and quietly and in a coordi- 
nated way, he coordinates in five minutes. 
Sometimes he gets hold of himself by not 
stopping his work altogether and by merely 
taking it up in a less uncoordinated place. 
He finds that practically anything which he 
can do in a coordinated way at once, rests 
him at once. 

This fact is the main fact about a man and 



246 Invisible Exercise 

the fact from which everything he can do 
should start. All he has to do is to follow it 
to its logical conclusion. 

My friend is well in a minute^ he says, if 
he slips away from his desk and plays golf. 
Precisely the same man when he stops aiming 
wildly with a fountain pen — begins aiming a 
golf stick — begins aiming it straight, is well 
in a minute. 

If sitting at his desk he aimed his ideas as 
well as he aims his golf stick, his ideas would 
do him as much good as his golf stick does. 
The particular ideas he has now which are 
well aimed, do him good now. The ideas 
he has always aimed well and that he has 
become distinguished for, have always done 
him as much good as his golf. The only 
trouble with him is that under the pressure 
of his ambition and his opportunity he has let 
himself of late years get into the habit when 
aiming ideas of not stopping long enough or 
often enough to keep his aim in good form 
and be a good shot. He has found himself 
making an astounding number of poor shots 
and has been told he must give himself up to 
rest. 

But a do-nothing rest — an unaimed anH 
collapsed rest — he finds is not only a most 
tiring, but a most disastrous self-indulgence. 



Letting Nature Be Natural 247 

So now he is taking six hours of aiming a 
golf stick a day. He is taking six hours of 
doing something he perfectly coordinates to 
do, and knows he coordinates to do, to get 
him back to his standard of coordination and 
to where he will dare try to see once more, 
if he can aim an idea. 

What it all comes to for my friend is this : 
In sitting at his desk he holds himself wrong 
and in standing up to play golf he holds him- 
self right. 

If he would learn to sit so that it would not 
tire him — so that he could be resting and 
stretching his back all day at his desk — he 
would not have to spend his time as he does 
now — six hours out of every twenty-four — 
one-third of his walking time every day, in 
being valet to a golf ball. 

What my friend is suffering from is the 
extreme effort he keeps making. This ex- 
treme effort he keeps making is because he 
is running himself, mind and body on the ties 
instead of on the rails. Very little effort 
would be needed on the rails. In other words 
a comparatively delicate, highly organized 
man is making an effort which would give 
Samson himself nervous prostration. 

When he is sitting at his desk aiming at an 



248 Invisible Exercise 

idea he loses his aim with his back and when 
he is aiming a golf stick he doesn't. 

If he aims his back when he thinks, it won't 
hurt him to think. 



Every man has his favorite unkrinklers — 
certain things he knows to do which he likes 
to do and which the moment he begins them, 
proceed to take out the krinkles both in his 
mind and in his body — things that induce co- 
ordinated positions and suddenly soothe his 
nerves. 

With me it is puttering about with a saw 
and a nail or so, preparing some little handy 
surprise in the house while the others are 
away, or I play with the pruning shears or 
an axe and cut out pictures of Mount Tom 
through the trees. Walking is the best un- 
krinkler for many people. 

Every man has his own set of activities 
which when he is way down, he can use to pull 
himself out with, things which unconsciously 
swing him into a right rhythm — that is into 
a right position of mind and body and get 
his mind and body started. 

Certain men and women are unkrinklers. 
They seem to put sometimes, just with a pass- 
ing word, one's whole world about one into 



Letting Nature Be Natural 249 

happy relations. They have the electric or 
coordinating touch and fill one's world about 
one for hours after they are gone with rich- 
ness, meaning and expectation. 

But all these things are inconvenient and 
cumbersome as compared with playing a little 
invisible tune on one's backbone. 

What is it that is good about our favorite 
unkrinklers? We have good old habits of 
position in them. From sheer inertia the 
moment we take them up we have stopped 
the bad or cramped habits associated with 
our overwork, and we are well. 

Of course, it is to be admitted that in an in- 
valid condition one must select the most co- 
ordinating thing to do, whatever it is, and 
do it. 

But all these easy unkrinkling occupations 
are really for, is to act as mere pointers to 
the way — if one would coordinate in it — one 
could do what one is doing already. 

It is a slave's life to be always obliged to 
hold up what one is doing and pick out some 
other more coordinating thing to do instead. 

The natural substitute would seem to be 
for a man to take a drill which will give him 
the habit of good position for his back, which 
will give him when he sits at his desk and 
(does what he wants to do and is inspired to 



250 Invisible Exercise 

do, as much headway In a good habit as he 
has now in a bad one. 

Health apparently consists in seeing the 
point, in making one's body take In an idea; 
that Is, take In Its own relation, or coordina- 
tion. It Is as stupid for a body to use up 
two, four or six hours to take in a ten-minute 
idea, as it is for a mind. One's body should 
be made aware. 



IV 

A BRIDGE, SOME STAIRS AND A MORAL 
\{The Bridge) 

The other day when I was walking all 
alone across a steel bridge I heard out of 
a dead silence, a soft and mysterious clanking 
In the strips of steel above my head and when 
I looked around to see what could be doing 
such a thing, there wasn't a single blessed 
thing in sight but a litde yellow dog. 

After he had gone and the soft vast deli- 
cate echoing clank he had made in the cross 
pieces over my head had ceased, I stood on 
the bridge alone. 

I could not bear to be outdone by a little 
yellow dog. I could not bear to have my 
nation, my civilization, my world outdone by 
a little yellow dog ! 

I stood alone and thought. 
When a little yellow dog shakes a huge 
iron bridge by merely running across the great 
helpless thing in a perfectly coordinated and 
therefore absolutely rhythmical way; when a 
little yellow dog by merely piling up little soft 
fluffs of his feet, one upon the other, until the 
251 



252 Invisible Exercise 

bridge can't stand it any longer — makes it 
tremble all over, he illustrates what the 
highly-coordinated stroke — that is to say, the 
extraordinary light stroke of force thought- 
fully and perfectly placed — can do and is in- 
tended to do in Nature. 

(The Stairs ) 

The same law that gives the little yellow 
dog, by sheer poetry of motion — by sheer 
mathematically accurate coordination of his 
back and his legs — the power to play like this 
on a thousand tons of steel, stands by a man 
who puts all his organs politely in place, co- 
ordinates lightly his legs and his back and 
proceeds to fleck himself up four flights of 
stairs. 

The sense of levitation which takes place 
in a hundred-and- fifty-pound man when he 
has once learned the knack, has once learned 
the position of mechanical advantage and has 
come to have by practice a super-coordinated 
back, is not only a stupendous physical, but a 
stupendous intellectual and spiritual experi- 
ence. Going upstairs like this the first time 
one discovers the thing can be done — it is not 
too much to say — is an act of worship and 
exaltation. 

I daresay it sounds a little extreme to say 



Some Stairs and a Moral 253 

this. I am not saying that it is an experience 
I am recommending right and left to every- 
body. I am saying what happened to one 
man the first day he found he had learned to 
go upstairs. One feels in touch with the Cre- 
ator when He first had the idea of the body 
of a man— first thought out on creation 
morning, how easily it could be made to 
work. It is a fine thing, one thinks as one 
flecks up the stairs, this having all the prac- 
tical advantages of being an angel and with- 
out looking ridiculous too and without both- 
ering with wings. ... All I can say about it 
is that for me, at least, it is an essentially re- 
ligious experience — this unbelievable lightness 
this poetry — this brutal ease of the human 

body. 

For quite a time when I had got over the 
'drill stage and was having my first real fling 
of enjoying the habit of ordering myself 
about, I had regular little orgies of walking 
upstairs. 

I would go into an office building, skip the 
elevator the first four stories, or I would get 
ofl four stories early. 

I often fall to thinking when I do it, of 
what it would be like if everybody in New 
York took up with this little idea and made 
a fad of it. 



254 Invisible Exercise 

If people all began In New York every 
morning, taking the elevator two or three or 
four stories late or getting off of it three or 
four stories early, get out of it a tenth of 
what I got out of it, the stairs in office build- 
ings in New York would soon be so crowded^ 
people would have to take turns in being al- 
lowed the privilege of skipping the elevators. 

My general idea of a quick, convenient 
stairway setting-up exercise — a balancing ex- 
ercise for the day — is this : 

Take an elevator one week, two stories 
late, and the next week three and the next 
four. Stop on the landings long enough to 
say No, to the legs, to make the legs wait 
for the back; give the back orders to lift the 
legs and the neck orders to relax. Then let 
the head go forward and up and your back 
widen and lengthen to take your step (you 
get so that you give these orders invisibly and 
in a flash) before each step, then take your 
step. Float up three flights. Let your back 
slip you up the last six steps of each flight 
as if your legs were not there. 

A man who does this — does it as many 
floors as it takes to get him Into position for 
the day — when he finally reaches his floor 
feels like capering down the corridor, fairly 
soaring into his office and alighting In his 



Somg Stairs and a Moral 255 

chair. He feels like capering at his work. 
And, while I would not recommend that any 
man should make a splurge in New York, 
of capering at his work, I must say that a 
sobered-up caper — a man's having everybody 
who does business with him feel that he would 
caper if he could, having everybody just see 
he is just holding his caper in while he works 
— Is not what could be called bad for one's 
business. 

There Is but one thing to remember — If 
anybody asks my advice. Remember to feel 
like the little yellow dog on the bridge. What- 
ever you do or however long it takes on the 
stairs, keep your back coordinated. Take each 
step one by one with your back wound up 
ahead. Take each landing and each flight 
with your back wound up ahead. Feel like 
going eight. Go four. Then step into your 
office, take up the four extra flights of stairs 
you feel all curled up inside you, and put them 
in your business for the day. 

{The Moral) 

One spends all one's time In this mortal 
life In either standing, walking, lying down 
or sitting. One never misses a minute. If 
one learns how to do these four things there 
is not a minute until the day one dies, when 



256 Invisible Exercise 

one cannot be practicing and practicing un- 
consciously on one's health. 

No matter what it is one does or has to 
do, if one knows how to do these four things 
with the line of least resistance, with smooth- 
ness, with joyous perfection, the very posi- 
tion one does one's work with becomes itself 
a recreation. The whole weight and brunt 
of one's daily habit of life, fights for one's 
health. 

If one does not know how to do these 
four things one lives in, everything one does 
fights against one's health. One cannot even 
lie down without its being bad for one's 
health. 

If thousands of people every night waste 
their strength even while they sleep, what they 
do while they work can only be imagined. 

If I were asked by a man who is careless 
about keeping well, what he could do to be 
sure to make himself think to take care of his 
health, I would say that the best thing for 
him to do, would be to arrange to set the 
whole subject of health one side, dispose of 
it by not having to think of it at all. 

This is why I believe so much in a man's 
using the simple mechanical device of ironing 
out the curve in his back, getting back-control 
or single control of his whole body. 



The Moral 257 

He will not need to keep reminding him- 
self to take care of his health. By knowing 
the one thing — by knowing how to take him- 
self up kindly, but firmly by his own back — 
he will know how to walk, to sit down, lie 
down and stand up. 

And the way he walks, lies down, sits down 
and stands up all day, all night, all his life 
will take care of his health for him. 



V 

LOOKING UP THE OPEN ROAD 



THE CONSENT TO LIVE 

ONE day not long ago when I was taking 
a vacation in a North Carolina village 
up in the mountains where people go from 
every state in the Union, I looked out of a 
window up the crooked little street and saw 
a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Justice of the 

Supreme Court of the State of walking 

placidly up the road eating chocolates out of 
a bag. 

Suddenly, when his wife appeared coming 
out of a store two doors away he whisked the 
bag into his pocket, made a big swallow, 
looked at the scenery hard and walked on 
looking as much like an angel as he could. 

He had nearly died six months ago from 
having to tote around permanently— laid 
way on him here and there — a hundred-and- 
thirty pounds of sugar he never really used 
and by virtue of being put under guard to 
eat, and making a solemn promise not to eat 
except in his wife's presence, it had been 
duly decided at last by the authorities that 
he should be allowed to live. 

I happened to know this fact and as I 
261 



262 Invisible Exercise 

looked out of my window and saw him — 
that great hulk of Awe, of Impressiveness, 
Fortress of Justice in my native land — act- 
ing suddenly like a nice guilty slinking six- 
year-old boy driven to eating his chocolates 
in the streets so mamma wouldn't see him, I 
enjoyed his chocolates as much as he did. 

Then I stood in the window and thought. 
There must be something about it I did 
not understand. 

Here was a man making himself endlessly 
amusing to everybody, making a perfect guy 
of himself on the edge of the grave, with 
his wife, four daughters and fifteen doctors 
slaving away on him night and day, trying 
to get him to consent to live, and he did not 
want to live — I watched him as he rolled up 
the hill. He would rather have his choco- 
lates and die. 

I watched him out of sight. 

Then I drew back from my window and 
sat down and wrote this next chapter. 

How should a man be made to feel about 
his health? 

He should feel wild about it. He should 
be swept before It as he is swept before 
chocolates. 

Anything less or different from this — any- 
thing that does not proceed upon the principle 



The Consent to Live 263 

in dealing with health, of tempting people 
with it, the principle of having health eloped 
with — is not worth trying for. 

How can this be brought to pass ? 

I saw Briney's Alderney heifer yesterday 
rubbing her head on her iron stake and tip- 
ping it half over. She had an idea that she 
could stop an itch under her ear with the 
stake, but if she had pushed it an inch-and-a- 
half further she would have been in clover. 
All she had to do was to say No a second, 
stop accepting her conception of herself, as 
a cow tied to a stake, try to push her stake 
way over instead of half over. But she had 
a fixed notion, an obsession, a conception of 
herself as being a cow that couldn't. So she 
didn'tt If Briney's cow could have been ex- 
posed to another cow who had had the con- 
ception that if you could tip a stake half over 
you could tip it all over, she would not only 
have been in clover yesterday, but the clover 
would have been in her. 

The same principle holds good for the 
sugary judge. 

He has a fixed conception of himself that 
he cannot help eating too much sugar. 

It is a mere convention — a habit of his 
mind — an obsession Imposed upon him, the ' 
way the cow's is, from the outside. ^ 



264 Invisible Exercise. 

Sugar hypnotizes him. He is seized bodily 
by httle lumps of chocolate. He has chills 
of sweets. 

He has all the traits of a person suffering 
from an epidemic. 

It is just as possible to have him catch self- 
control, to have the epidemic run the other 
way if he is once started right, if society will 
expose him to self-control as well as it ex- 
poses him to chocolate. 

Having a new self begins first with a new 
conception. This new conception a man has 
of himself is a germ cell which takes effect 
implacably, imperiously. The acme of prac- 
tical power, when one analyzes it, is noth- 
ing more nor less than what is called an ideal. 
The word ideal — a kind of nickname in most 
people's minds for beautiful and wistful in- 
efficiency — thus comes to stand for the one 
determining force in making a man over in 
middle life. He must have a concept of his 
new self — that is to say of his real or possible 
self — which overshadows, possesses and re- 
fertilizes his whole inner being, soul and body. 

The first determining thing in what a man 
is, is what a man believes — what his imagi- 
nation of himself is possessed by. 

The second determining thing is his con- 



The Consent to Live 265 

ceptlon of the means by which this concep- 
tion can be embodied. 

He finds that the best way of clearing and 
perfecting his conception is with action. If 
one really does the thing, one sees plainly 
where one is. One knows whether one wants 
it. One precipitates decisions — rapid-fire de- 
cisions and rapid-iire opportunities and inspi- 
rations. One knows one's conception, one 
knows where it is, why it is, how one wants 
it different and corrects it. 

I have precipitated these two conceptions 
in this book — the conception of the end of 
what a man can be and wants to be, and the 
conception of the means — of the mechanical 
clinch by which, inch by inch, he makes him- 
self be it. 



n 

THE USE OF FADS AND TABOOS 

If I were an employment manager and haH 
to pick out in a long line of people which 
were the quickwitted ones, in a few minutes, 
I could tell more by watching their feet than 
by looking at their faces. At least their faces 
and their feet should be used to check each 
other up and make sure of results. Light- 
footedness and quick-mindedness go together. 
Lightfootedness is based on a preciseness of 
preserving the balance. If people sit down 
heavily or prefer slumping positions or jar in 
walking it is because the balance of the back 
is not precise and easy. 

My observations as an employment man- 
ager, of such people, would be that they never 
wear. They would wear themselves out and 
they would wear me out. 

The same principle of test that applies to 
people to be employed in stores and factories, 
should be applied in picking out and giving 
special opportunities to boys and girls, in 
schools. 

I have noticed for thirty years that the 
266 



The Use of Fads arid Taboos 267 

most fit people, the people I have taken to 
best, are the people one has the most fun 
with in taking a walk, — the people who like 
to walk off the beaten track and who prefer 
hills, mountains and uneven ground — who 
have light feet and who characteristically en- 
joy putting themselves where they have con- 
stant occasion for using them. 

The man who has the light step, who is 
ready for anything whether in mind or body, 
is apt to be — whether he is a college man or 
not, the most educated man. 

One of the first things I would arrange for 
If I were going to start a school for boys — a 
school which I wanted to have get quick pres- 
tige — would be to have admission possible 
only by competition. The first ten boys out 
of a hundred who were the lightest on their 
feet — other things being equal — would be the 
boys my school would pick out to educate, 
to make its wager on, and establish its pres- 
tige before the world. 

In this way the twenty best and most- 
coveted schools for boys — the schools boys 
try to get into in this country — could at once 
start the swing of our nation over into a na- 
tional epidemic of soundness, of health and 
coordination. 

Whatever a boy's class, position or origin' 



268 Invisible Exercise 

may be, a boy's step — if he wants to get into 
a school, a high-grade school for high-class 
pupils — is the thing that should be insisted on 
first. 

For the purpose of testing, of rating men 
for their eventual opportunities in life, one 
need not care so much at first, whether people 
are learned or what is ordinarily called edu- 
cated, or not. If they can pass examinations 
for their feet, their heads will take care of 
themselves. 

The same principle could be made a fad or 
a popular motive of emulation for other 
special advantages in intellectual training, 
like the colleges and the graduate schools. 

A boy who has not a light step, who jars 
and who is being frankly contentedly un- 
derwitted with his body, is not a good college 
risk. What is the use of sending him to col- 
lege to be a light to civilization — educating 
the other end of him to understand, to con- 
nect him up with everything, to connect him 
up with the ends of the earth — when he does 
not even connect up with his own feet ? When 
he cannot even balance himself, cannot even 
hang himself on his own back, why should 
he undertake a League of Nations, run a bank 
or invest other people's money? 



m 

MAKING HEALTH CATCHING 

During the early days of the war when it 
still seemed incredible that the Germans could 
be doing what they were doing, a man said 
to me one day, as if it settled the thing — 
"One German can be crazy, but fifty-nine mil- 
lion Germans cannot be crazy.'' 

"It works just the other way around," I 
said. 

It was a great deal easier for one German 
to be crazy with fifty-nine million others all 
around him to help. 

Taking psychology and human nature as it 
is, there does not seem to be any reason to 
doubt that the one thing to make an outline 
for and plan for in the matter of national 
health, is nothing less than an epidemic. 
People like to do things together. Anything 
less than this or different, will be expensive 
and will be slow, and will not come off in time 
for those of us who conceive it and who want 
the benefit of it ourselves, and who want to 
live in a health-epidemic now. Starting a 
health epidemic for the unborn — for poster- 
369 



270 Invisible Exercise 

ity — has its points, of course, but the prac- 
tical working difficulty with it is that the best 
people, that is the people who want to do 
things and enjoy things in this world, are the 
people who want to live in a health-epidemic 
now, who want a decent world in which to do 
things, and pleasant and lively people to live 
with before they die. 

In most of our colleges for men and women 
an epidemic has recently swept the country 
of flopping overshoes — of wopsy feet trailing 
'down the public way. The women's colleges 
have been seized with earlessness. Women 
throughout the country at large have had an 
epidemic of wearing their heels higher. What 
if there were started an epidemic of wearing 
,;their backs longer? The conception of wear- 
ing a back longer, of balancing one's self, of 
walking instead of hunching, is as easily 
caught from being with people who have it 
as highheelitis is. The governing thing, the 
germ cell of what happens and has got to 
happen in this world, is always found to be 
the conception people have of what they are 
like and would like to be like, that seizes their 
minds. 

Of course, I need not try to conceal it, even 
if I would: This book wants to be an epidemic 
— wants to see twenty million people exposed 



Making Health Catching 271; 

to the Idea in it as only a book could expose 
them — because in a book everybody can be 
exposed to it simultaneously, can get the same 
impulse at the same time and can act on the 
same impulse at the same time — which, of 
course, is the first principle of epidemics. 

Then having searched out and rounded up 
with a book in a hundred thousand cities, 
twenty million people scattered about that 
the book expresses to themselves, we will hear 
these people expressing the book and drama- 
tizing the book to others up and down the 
streets, and everywhere and all in one piece, 
our epidemic will begin. 

At all events, when it comes, it is in some 
such way as this — catching like a world war 
— that health will come to the people. 

The way to bring national health to pass 
is going to be in due time, whoever does it, 
by the nature-method or epidemic method, 
the method of geometrical progression and 
contagion. 

To cure the people of their obsessions, of 
weakness and illness, truth shall be organic, 
shall have integrity, shall breed its way 
through the customs, the daily conceptions 
and working ideals of the people — through 
places like saloons on every corner, pubs of 
well-being exposing people to temptations 



272 Invisible. Exercise 

to be well, cigar shops, soHa fountains and 
tea-rooms and candy stores of goodness, and 
people going about everywhere exposed to 
health the way they are now to things to 
wear and things to eat, and show-windows 
and movies. 



CLOSING INTRODUCTION 



WHY THERE IS ONE 

AN introduction should really be place'd 
at the serious or working end of a book, 
the end where the author drops introducing 
the idea to the reader and the reader begins 
introducing the idea to himself. 

And people who are going to read about 
an idea are not as interesting to say things to 
as those who have. 

And if a book is really an experience with 
an idea and the reader remembers himself 
as being in one place toward an idea at the 
beginning and finds himself in another at the 
end, it is possible to say things at the end in 
a paragraph which at the beginning would 
have taken a hundred pages or could not 
have been said at all. 

§ i. Putting the First Thing First 

Question: Why do men live shorter lives 
in proportion than the animals? Judging 
the proper length of men's lives as the lives 
of all animals are judged — by the time 
they spend in the womb — a man should die 
in his hundred and fiftieth year. 
27s 



276 Invisible Exercise 

And why should a woman — Instead of hav- 
ing children by proxy, being dismissed into a 
grandmother in the forties — not be still re- 
joicing and still having children — if she wants 
to on her ninety-ninth birthday? 

Because human beings do not study in the 
way animals do, their own personal line of 
least resistance or comfort. 

Human beings die at seventy^ — and many 
of them wish they were dead at sixty — be- 
cause they live in slight but constant friction 
and run their lives off their balance. Men 
who have only half-learned to lie down and 
only half-learned to sit up, who can only 
half-walk, stagger along subtly and elegantly 
seventy years. Then they tip over into their 
graves. 

If there is anything worth a man's doing 
in the way of education in this world — even 
if he stops everything else to do it — it would 
seem to be studying his own line of least re- 
sistance, studying his own not making an 
;effort. 

And it is not even necessary. In order to 
study It, to stop doing anything. 

All he has to do is to go on doing whatever 
he has to do, and balance to do it. 

The first thing for this nation to do, before 
it tries to balance other nations, is to begin 



Putting the First Thing First 277 

by having the people In It balance themselves. 
Then they can branch out. We must begin 
by taking the people we want to see doing cer- 
tain things and balancing them so that they 
can do them. 

So I bring forward in this book, in the life 
of each man and in the life of the nation, a 
program of having the first thing put first. 

§ 11. Still Putting the First Thing First 

It is not possible for any power on earth 
to get in privately behind the sexual life of 
a nation and control, in behalf of a nation, 
the producing of children in it that shall be 
as perfect and as fit to live, as the animals 
the nation is producing at the same time, but 
it is possible to get in behind the lives of chil- 
dren when once they have been produced and 
by the third or fourth year see to it that every 
child in America Is properly set up, holds him- 
self as well In hand when he is practicing on 
sitting down, and when he is learning to walk, 
as he does when he is practicing on lying on 
his back In his crib. 

His crib-standard can be kept up. He can 
be made Immune to children's digestive 
troubles. False positions and false habits 
and tendencies which it would take weeks or 



278 Invisible Exercise, 

years to cure when he Is grown up, in his sixth 
year can be made right for life in a few 
hours. 

It may be decreed, and probably will be for 
some time, that cows and pigs and hens in 
America shall be better born, shall be more 
perfect for eating purposes than men and 
women in it are allowed to be for living pur- 
poses, but it does not follow that we shall 
not, after we are born, take as good care o'f 
the flesh and blood we live in, as we do of 
the flesh and blood we kill and eat. 

It is not an uncommon experience for a 
man who worships his Creator— that is for a 
man who has a religious or biological mind, 
to stand and look at a stock farm a little 
longingly. When a man first begins study- 
ing the people he is having to live with, 

and that his children will have to live with 

and sees how much wiser deeper and more 
conclusive arrangements are being made for 
unborn pigs to be happy In this world than 
are being made for the people in it, he strikes 
through into some very honest and thorough 
thinking. 

The first thing a man thinks of who Is re- 
ligiously biological, who is as straightforward 
and enthusiastic about his kind as The New 
Testament, is that, of course, now that society 



Putting the First Thing First 279 

knows the facts it will proceed from now on 
to sterilize the extremely unfit — pull the 
world together in two generations. 

Then he comes up against the fact in hu- 
man nature that standing up for the rights of 
the unborn— now that you are born yourself 
— does not seem to arouse any great interest 
and that probably it will be a long time be- 
fore we can hope that society in dealing with 
sex will be as straightforward and fine and 
honest, as sex is in dealing with us. 

He realizes that it is going to continue 
to be assumed within the lifetime of most 
of us that nothing can really be done, 
that society has no right to defend itself from 
venereal diseases, that for generation after 
generation there is nothing to do but to go 
on making a vast sewage system out of hu- 
man nature itself, making out of the innocent 
and unborn children in each new generation 
the sewers of what was evil in the last. 

The best thing left to do seems to be, 
therefore, to take the people when they are 
born and teach them in their early years how 
to have such an ingrained habit of self-con- 
trol, of intimacy and balance between the 
mind and the body, that by the time they are 
fifteen, their habits of posture and of move- 
ment and subconscious acts of every day will 



2 8o Invisible Exercise 

be so set and under such headway that de- 
generacy and uncoordination will be uncon- 
genial and irksome to them and will have a 
comparatively small chance at them and soon 
be thrown off. 

§ iii. This Book and Education 

Self-control may be defined as the power 
of giving orders to one's own mind, of de- 
termining in a comparatively high degree at 
any time the content and the direction of the 
content of the brain. 

A man may be said to be educated in pro- 
portion as he is trained in the science of self- 
reminder, in the persistent, consecutive cul- 
minating power of keeping his mind and 
body reminded who he is. 

The education that makes a man do a thing 
with his mind and body together or not at 
all — the education that very little children 
and men of genius have — in the next thirty 
years or so, is going to be thrown open to 
everybody. 

Education Is going to be no longer defined 
In a superficial and discouraged way as the 
power to do things. 

Education is going to consist not In our 
power to do things — a superficial and dis- 



This Book and Education 281 

couraged thing — but in our power to make 
ourselves want to do the things; the power 
in every man of waking up the swing and the 
rhythm of his mind and his body and making 
them do the things for him. 

The technique I have brought forward in 
this book, the trained power in a man to give 
orders to the neck and the back and through 
the back, to make the whole body a brain, to 
make the body translucent, a visible spirit, 
is the quintessence of education. As people's 
faces light up, the whole figure of a man 
should light up. The animals that live with 
us go about with lighted-up bodies all the 
time. They never miss a minute, as machine- 
led human beings do, in not being eloquent 
and convincing. Everybody believes them. 
What they say goes. And what they do is 
done. 

§ iv. This Book and the Practical Teacher 

Everything I have had to say about con- 
necting up the conscious with the subconscious 
powers of the mind and body — sending a 
telegram down through a man to the depths 
of his being — is true and is going to come to 
pass as a practical program in our schools 
the moment it is recognized by teachers and 



282 Invisible Exercise 

others that the one fundamental thing eHuca- 
tion is for is the waking up of the self-starter 
in people. 

This self-starter, as most people know 
who have had much to do with very young 
children, has been originally put into every- 
body. Every man in the course of his life 
has touched, or had touched, the button in 
him that flashes his mind and his body to- 
gether, turns on his subconscious powers, 
lends him for a few minutes twenty thousand 
years. 

But the touching of the button is acci- 
dental. Nobody seems to have bothered to 
see how he could do it again. 

The facts about these subconscious powers 
are already admitted by all of us. Every 
man has his happy times a few minutes long, 
of supercoordination, when he feels the 
twenty thousand years in him working for 
him. The immediate next thing each man 
who is interested in educating himself or ifi 
educating others wants now is to see why, and 
see how, these minutes come. Then drill the 
minutes into habits and into hours. 

This is why it has seemed to me supremely 
important that some regular system of self- 
reminder such as I have brought forward in 
this book should be within the reach of every- 



This Book and. the Practical Teacher 283 

body. What we seem to demand in our pres- 
ent civilization both for ourselves and for all 
the people with whom we try to deal, is not 
more knowledge about coordination, but a 
technique which sums our knowledge up, 
some definite, simple, commanding act of 
coordination to which we can turn habitually 
when we need it, some psycho-mechanical act 
at once spiritual and physical, by which one 
frees and projects one's self from the obses- 
sion of the moment, consciously connects up 
with the accumulated subconscious automatic 
powers of the mind and the body — an exer- 
cise by which with one invisible motion one 
switches on the eternal, the infinite race- 
consciousness — the twenty-thousand-years-a- 
minute power that lies in all of us. 

To sum up the gist of this book and put 
it in five sentences before the practical teacher. 

I. The practical teacher knows that the 
quintessence of power in a real education, lies 
in the power, not to do things, but to make 
one's self want to do things. 

II. The art of making one's self want to 
do things turns on the art of integrity — upon 
a man's being able to get his conscious or 
creative mind and his unconscious or body- 
mind, to do things for him together. 

III. Making the connection between these 



2.84 Invisible Exercise 

two worlds in a human being — the connection 
between the powers of his higher and his 
lower mind, is education. 

IV. The isthmus between these two worlds 
in a man, connecting up each of them with 
all that the other has, is the neck. 

V. The neck from now on is to have the 
basic right of way, in all sincere or honest 
education. 

The fact that all our education and our 
civilization must face next and must put first 
next, is that a man does not have any more 
brains than his command of his neck will let 
him have. 

We have already guessed this truth — 
though as yet vaguely and weakly, in our 
recognition of manual training. 

We are now going to take this central 
spinal idea, carry it through to its logical 
conclusion in our schools, apply it or apply 
the principle of it to waking up all knowledge, 
to waking up the great deeps of being in 
people, to making every man's education at 
once the most solid, most spiritual, most pene- 
trating and honest thing in his life. 



This Book and the Reader 285 

§ V. This Book and the Reader 

If there are two things put before a Typ- 
ical American in a book — the first a thing he 
is to read about before doing, and the second 
a thing he is to do — nine Americans out of 
ten will turn over the leaves in reading about 
the thing to do and cut across lots to it and 
begin doing it. They interrupt what you 
are saying to them, skip two hundred pages 
right past you and without so much as saying 
"by your leave" they begin doing it! 

Doubtless if there were some way an au- 
thor could prowl around a country with a 
printed page and pick people out, he would 
see that the particular reader whose particu- 
lar eye is this minute on this page is a very 
rare type of American — a type which does 
not cut across lots — but the majority of 
Americans for whom this book is written are 
not like this. When we want a thing we cut 
across lots to it so quick we go by it alto- 
gether. And this book, like the author, be- 
longs with the majority. 

Not being an exception myself and having 
repeatedly, when learning my own lessons, 
jumped at conclusions and leaped prema- 
turely ahead at my exercise myself, I have 
wanted to be thou2:htful of others. 



2 86 Invisible Exercise 

I have wanted to save my reader if I could, 
from being delayed by his own impatience, 
from the mistake of attempting to embody 
the exercise before he has conceived it. 

For this reason ^'Invisible Exercise" has 
been conceived and published, not as a book, 
but as a series of seven lessons in the prin- 
ciples and practice of self-command, each 
lesson to be mailed to the pupil after he has 
had the last one. 

In the case of the people who take the 
lessons by mail this cutting across lots situa- 
tion is met by sending the lessons one by one 
a few days apart. 

For people who prefer their lessons in 
regular book form the first seven lessons are 
published in this one volume which the 
reader can buy in the bookshops and take 
home and read as a reader reads a book. I 
do not deny that what I have written hopes 
it is pleasant reading, and should be properly 
published as a book and read like any crea- 
tive interpretation of a great common human 
experience, as literature — as a work of crea- 
tive imagination, but there is something In 
it all for me, that goes further than this. And 
while I know that a man's self control is the 
most deadly earnest, deep-seated and char- 



This Book and the Reader 287 

acteristic thing In his life — while I know that 
I have no right except at last I am forgiven 
and thanked, what I really desire with a 
reader in this book is to invade — is to be 
allowed — to be invited to invade the sacred 
precincts of personality — invade his very life 
alone with himself — slip in like a spirit be- 
tween him and himself or what he puts up 
with as himself, and haunt him with who he 
is. . . . 

*'After you are through with me," this book 
says, *'I am not through with you!" 

In dealing with habit, whether one's own 
or other people's, being highhanded and cut- 
ting down through into people's subconscious 
experiences is the only way of being polite. 

I can only ask to be forgiven now in the 
hope of being thanked at last, if my reader 
finds he is not being taken as a reader at all, 
but as a fellow human being, one with whom 
I am looking for practical results, with whom 
I want to keep in close personal touch if I 
can when he is taking these drills. 

At the same time I do not wish to intrude 
upon him this closer touch, and it has seemed 
to me fitting that the reader from now on 
should be the one to take the initiative. 

For this reason. The How-Book — The 



288 Invisible 'Exercise 

Practice Notes, pointers, reminders and fol- 
low-ups that are supposed to be especially 
revealing or useful to those who take the exer- 
cises — will be in a separate little volume by 
themselves. The more practical and imme- 
diate directions for use from day to day fol- 
lowing the idea up, are not thrust upon the 
man who is merely reading about it. 

§ vi. Forecast 

It is hoped that as rapidly as possible 
schools will be multiplied for the purpose of 
coaching adults and adolescents in the me- 
chanics of poise and coordination, and for 
the purpose of selecting and preparing espe- 
cially fitted and promising persons to con- 
duct classes in coordination for children. 

Of course, while a book like this will serve 
its purpose as a general introduction of the 
truer and more effortless idea of self-control, 
and while very satisfactory and valuable re- 
sults may be gained by the man who is teach- 
ing himself from a book, it goes without 
saying (considering how most people will be 
apt to practice) that the new control is likely 
to be learned more readily and with its more 
penetrating and profound benefits, with the 
help of a teacher. 



This Book and the Reader 289 

By opening up the idea to everybody how- 
ever, In this way and having a nation working 
on it, It is felt that both a demand and a 
supply of teachers will soon be Instituted, that 
there will follow a general national move- 
ment toward the art of personal Integrity, of 
creative control — the art of personal re-co- 
ordination and the eventual establishing 
everywhere of what Is going to be — called 
perhaps — in Its effect on our civilization, the 
newest and the greatest of the professions. 



APPENDIX 



INVISIBLE EXERCISE AND CHRISTIAN 
SCIENCE 

We have been passing through two great reactions 
apparently. The first was a reaction from the idea 
that disease lay entirely in the body. We carried 
this rather far. Disease was driven into people's heads 
and stuck there. Now we are having quite as nat- 
ural and healthy a reaction against the idea that 
disease is entirely in the mind. 

What I have been trying to do in Invisible Ex- 
ercise is to see the truth in the round as the average 
man of common sense and observation sees it, and 
express both of these reactions together. 

Invisible Exercise hopes to be useful to people 
who, like the author, have a real belief and a real 
experience in the power of the spirit over the body, 
but who want to know why and how, who find 
themselves more successful when they do know why 
and how. 

What we seem to want is a definite psycho- 
mechanical technique to be applied at a definite point 
which we know just why we undertake, and which 
we know just how we carry through. 

It has seemed to me that not only as a matter of 
fairness but as a matter of common national grati- 
tude, the people of this country should universally 
recognize today as they certainly are going to later, 
the incalculable service that has been rendered by 
the Christian Scientists and the related groups, in 
starting and maintaining the now implacable drift 
of modern thought and practice toward a more 
powerful rational and spiritual control of the body. 

293 



294 Invisible Exercise 

But after all is said and done, the fact remains 
that there are a great many people in plain sight to- 
day who would like to believe in the power of the 
spirit over the body, who have either had, or 
watched others having, experiences that seem to 
prove it, who, when they come to try to apply what 
they think they know to themselves, do not get 
results. 

Millions of men and women in America — prob- 
ably the overwhelming majority of us — daily face 
the fact that we do not seem to have a Christian 
Science Temperament. It does not seem to be nat- 
ural to us to meet our physical needs and limitations 
in the Christian Science way. It may be our fault, 
but we want something which is more detailed and 
technical — something which, however slight it may 
be, is at least mechanical enough and material 
enough to make us feel that we know and know 
substantially what it is that is happening to us. 

In addition to the millions of people who have 
not the Christian Science Temperament there 
are among the Christian Scientists themselves 
many men and women who are troubled with 
"flaws" and who fail to rise at inconvenient times 
to their practical belief. I am hoping that they are 
going to find this book, with its more physical, more 
pedestrian, more detailed belief in the spirit, a step- 
ladder to serenity and to faith. 

Personally, I do not think that Invisible Exercise 
should be regarded as a mere step-ladder. People 
may decide for themselves. I like to think that the 
fundamental principle I am expressing in these 
pages, promises in the end a more robust, rosy, lov- 
able and human religion for my fellow human beings 
than Christian Science, still in its beginning stages 
of course, has shown itself to be. 

In the meantime, we are all — Christian Scientists 



{Appendix 295 

and all of us, crowding and being crowded to- 
gether day by day, into a more practical, a more 
colossal truth. 

The truth we are being crowded toward together 
as I see it, instead of being a less believing is a 
more believing experience than for the present at 
least, most Christian Scientists I know, seem to like. 

It is not necessarily incompatible with being a 
true Christian Scientist, that one should know and 
should enjoy knowing just where and just why and 
just how it is, the spirit works its will upon the body. 

To some people it seems a more religious and 
more believing thing not to know just why and just 
how and just where the spirit takes its hold of the 
body. 

To others it is not only a useful but an exalting 
and even worshipping experience, finding out just 
why it is and knowing just how it is that the spirit 
is, must be and always will be the supreme factor 
in a human being — the power that has the casting 
vote in him, for good or evil, all his life. 

It seems to us a greater, more exact, more religious 
and exalting thing to believe that we have a God 
who is capable of creating a man who can follow 
up the idea of power as God has thought it out — a 
man who is exercising this power over his own body, 
consciously and knowing just how he does it — a man 
who is doing what he does with his body in a 
small far off way, with conscious and creative joy, 
just as a God would. 

I should think God would prefer us to believe 
that He is a God who would be able to make a 
man like this. 

Invisible Exercise — the act of consciously relaxing 
one's neck and pulling one's self soul and body to- 
gether before one's God, becomes in its significance, 
in a very practical form, a religious rite, an act of 



296 Invisible Exercise 

worship, of response, of entering into closer com- 
munion with one's Maker. 

I do not suppose that judging from the contents 
of this book I could be called either in fairness to 
myself or to the Christian Scientists, a Christian 
Scientist, but I would not mind if people called 
what is in this book a kind of Super-Christian 
Science. 

The Super-Christian Scientist when he appears is 
going to take these two noble words — the word 
Christian and the word Science — and work each 
through into the full power of the other. He is 
going to let his religion work down through into its 
details and worship God by appreciating and by con- 
sciously employing the mechanical facts — the psycho- 
mechanical facts in which He has chosen to express 
Himself intimately and constantly to each man in 
his own body. 



OTHERS 

I had intended in Invisible Exercise (as stated 
at the bottom of the tenth page) to end this intro- 
ductory account of my experiences and ideas on self- 
control with a chapter in the Appendix relating my 
experiences in this book to the experiences and ideas 
and books of others, but at the last moment as the 
book goes to press I am postponing to the second 
volume some of the comparisons and distinctions 
and acknowledgments I would like to make. 

I have expressed after a fashion in these last 
three pages the relation of my idea to The Chris- 
tian Scientists and I find that if I am to go on 
and deal with others with due courtesy to them 
and fairness to myself there are so many complica- 
tions of agreement and disagreement that it seems 
better not to let my book end in a mist of contro- 
versy and distinction. I can only let it stand by 
itself and speak for itself and wait. 



297 



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